Long afterwards his experience of the Collège d’Harcourt was to lend colour to his denunciation of pre-Revolutionary education. But the poorness of his intellectual training was the smallest sin committed against him in those days. The neglect of his character, his personality, was fatal. An affectionate interest on the part of his parents might have prepared him for the coming disappointment, but it was wholly denied. In his memoirs he speaks with a singular respect of them; at one time he even ventures to suggest that they probably kept away from him lest, in their great love, they should lose the courage to carry out the resolution to commit him to the Church! His father lived until 1788 and his mother until 1809, yet he never spent a week under the same roof with them. On Sundays one of the teachers would take him to dine with them, and after a formal hour or two his father would pat his head and tell him to “be good and obey Monsieur l’Abbé.” His finer qualities were irreparably neglected. His school-fellows were good comrades, but the eternal dulness of the place and the restraint of his parents depressed him. It was not an uncommon experience in this regard. You find much the same complaint about their school-days in the memoirs of most of his contemporaries. The particular difficulty in Talleyrand’s case was the absence of any encouraging words about the future. By this time he had begun to think about it. Gradually, he understood hints that it was not the fine halls of Versailles or the adventures of the camp, but the sombre world of the Church, to which he was destined. In his twelfth year, about the end of his college days, he caught the small-pox, and was hurried off to the house of a strange nurse in the Rue Saint-Jacques. Somehow he survived the deadly treatment usual at that time—great fires and hermetically-sealed windows—and escaped marking. But in his convalescence he pondered again on the absence of his mother. The time had now come for an open statement about his future. It seems probable that he was sent then, in 1766, to visit his uncle, who had just become coadjutor to the Archbishop of Rheims. It is likely enough that his parents would try to seduce him from military ambition by a sight of the archbishop-count’s brilliant ecclesiastical court, and Talleyrand affirms in his memoirs that he was taken from the college to Rheims. However, it was probably some time later that he spent a year with his uncle, as he talks of being in his fifteenth year. Mme. de Genlis says that she saw him at Rheims in his “eleventh or twelfth” year, but she describes him as wearing a soutane, so that she also probably refers to a later date. Whether or no he then visited Rheims, it is clear that in his twelfth or thirteenth year he was sent to Saint Sulpice, and shrank to find himself in the soutane.