At the age of five-and-thirty, after having attained the majority required by the Church, he was raised to the bishopric of Autun,--a fine appointment, which would afterwards lead to the archbishopric of Rheims and a cardinal's hat. The revenue of the see amounted to 60,000 francs, a magnificent situation for a young bishop, but such was the custom of the nobility; nevertheless, the bent of his inclinations led him to belong to the philosophical society, and the followers of the English school, which began to appear upon the horizon in 1789; among these were Mirabeau, Cabanis, Lally-Tollendal, and Mounier, in fact all the men who were dreaming of a reform in France. People said wittily that M. de Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, with his prebend and his bishopric, looked upon himself as an abuse. At this time people were animated with a glorious passion for suppressing themselves; and when one recollects that the proposal to abolish the titles of nobility was made by De Montmorency, De Montesquiou, La Rochefoucauld, De Talleyrand, and Clermont-Tonnerre, those illustrious elders of the French nobility, one must honestly confess that an incomprehensible spirit of vertigo had taken possession of the French society. There was in this something so insane, so eccentric, that I imagine the ancient nobility must have been led by an interested motive towards the suppression of titles: during the last three centuries so many patents of nobility had been conferred, that the really illustrious families were no longer distinguished: there were too many titled plebeians. Now, if all titles were abolished by a decree, all this nobility of a modern date would be entirely suppressed, for it depended solely upon royal grants and letters patent written according to the caprice of the sovereign; whilst those who bore a historical name, as the Rochefoucaulds, the Montmorencys, and the Montesquious, had no need of deeds to prove their genealogy; it was part of the soil. The Abbé de Talleyrand was in possession of his rich bishopric of Autun when the States-General were convened, and he was appointed deputy of the clergy of his diocese to the Constituent Assembly, so remarkable from its adventurous spirit, the boldness of its conceptions, and its total want of connexion, and absence of all kind of unity or method, either moral or political. The Constituent Assembly was a great chaos, where the opinions of men of talent clashed with each other, where all sorts of extravagances were proposed in the executive government, and all the ideas most fitted to overturn the monarchy and the society of France were encouraged; Rousseau's social contract was applied to a people already old in its customs and civilisation.