Beside the privileged order of nobility stood the privileged corporation of the Church. Like the nobles, the Church owned vast landed estates, which covered about a fifth part of France, and which in many cases were managed well. Like the nobles, the dignitaries of the Church retained the ancient feudal rights which had survived from the days when they governed the country, besides a variety of dues and charges, and their special prerogative--the tithe. Like the nobles, they evaded the weight of taxation. The assembly of the clergy, meeting every five years, negotiated with the Crown its own contributions to the Exchequer, and obtained numberless concessions from the local authorities, wherever its interests were touched. Moreover, the Church still enjoyed political power. No one in France had a legal right to live outside its pale. It controlled the schools; it kept the parish registers, on which a man's title to his property and his name depended; for the sake of Catholic truth it burned its adversaries; and, through its censorship of the Press, it silenced all assailing tongues. Then too, like the nobility, the Church offered many contrasts of condition. The great prelates who lived at Court maintained with all the lavishness of laymen the well-bred profusion of the place. Their wealth rivalled that of princes. The Archbishop of Cambrai was the feudal suzerain of seventy-five thousand people, lord of the town of Cambrai, patron of two great abbeys, and a Duke and Count to boot. The ecclesiastical income enjoyed by M. de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, besides his ministerial salary and pension, is stated to have exceeded, according to a modern standard, fifty-four thousand pounds. The Archbishop of Rouen, apart from his episcopal revenues, drew from his abbeys twenty thousand pounds a year. The Bishop of Troyes received penitents in confessionals lined with white satin. M. de Rohan, hereditary Bishop of Strasbourg, held a splendid Court in his great palace at Saverne, and exalted the dignity of a prince of the Church by having all his saucepans made of silver. When one contrasts with this delicate existence the condition of the vast majority of parish priests, whose plebeian birth shut on them the door to preferment, who lived, often in ruined and neglected parsonages, in the abandoned country districts, with no educated friends about them, dispensing the meagre charities of the august superiors who could not leave the Court to visit them, and supporting the lofty pretensions of the Catholic Church on incomes of forty, of twenty, and of sixteen pounds a year, one ceases to wonder that the priests abhorred a lot, which 'made even the stones and beams of their miserable dwellings cry aloud,' and that, when the day of retribution came, they welcomed the destroyer, and refused to lift a finger to defend the existing system in the Church of France.