But I will return presently to the character of the clergy on the eve of the Revolution. Though wealth and prestige and political power were to be had in the clerical profession, the young Talleyrand bitterly resented his situation. By a healthy instinct he felt that, as later experience showed, he was totally unfitted for the Church. Hence he quickly developed a habit of silent and cynical observation, of disregard for authority and conventional ideals, and of unhealthy isolation and self-possession. Many years afterwards an emigrant bishop, who had been a schoolfellow of his at Saint Sulpice, recalled how he used to say to his one or two close friends: “They want to make a priest of me, but they will have an unpleasant time of it.” He himself says that he hardly spoke a word during the first three years at the seminary. His recreation hours were spent in its splendid library, where he sought especially the lives of statesmen “and moralists,” works of travel and adventure, and books that described all kinds of violent movements and upheavals in Nature and the social order. He had not the temperament of a revolutionary; his experience and reading led rather to a complete atrophy of his power of devotion to an idea or an institution. In his theology he would read how the service of religion demanded perfect ministers—“victims without blemish,” in the words of the Church; yet his superiors blandly accepted those who were rejected by army or Court. He saw injustice and hypocrisy on every side, and concluded that loyalty and devotion were masks. So, as time went on, he retreated more and more within himself, made his own interest the measure of his acquiescence, and learned the essential qualities of a diplomatist. In later years he saw advantages in the training. It was well to have been thus “dipped in the waters of the Styx.” He never spoke or wrote a harsh word of his parents,[2] or of Saint Sulpice, or of the Church. “Well, God keep his soul, but I like him,” said Pius VII of Talleyrand, after his first struggle with Napoleon.