The articles relating to the bishops excited the greatest amount of dissatisfaction in many quarters. It meant the realization of that idea which Bonaparte had expressed to Cardinal Martiniana in the year preceding--the utter abolition of the old hierarchy--and the substitution of one entirely new and conformable to the order of things about to be established. Before the Revolution there were in France 136 Episcopal Sees. In the scheme of Bonaparte these were to be reduced to fifty only, of which ten were to be metropolitan, although later, in 1801, he was pleased to add ten other sees to the number. Commenting upon this reduction, Cardinal Mathieu observes: "Sixty-six cities were thus subjected to a moral and material decline from which they have never since rallied. Indeed, each of these suppressed Sees was illustrated with memorials of apostleship and holiness, with monuments, with religious establishments of every kind which gave to the episcopal cities an importance superior to that of their population and made them so many interesting little capitals, wherein were often hidden men of great merit. The dignitaries of the secular and regular clergy, some families of impoverished gentlemen or well-to-do bourgeois and professional people, maintained therein an amiable society which kept up in the most secluded provinces the best traditions of the old regime--courtesy, a taste for literature and charity for the poor. All these little centres of intellectual and moral life were blotted out and the Concordat thus only sanctioned the destruction effected by the Revolution." It was mainly because of reflections like these that the old émigré bishops received the news of these articles with so sad a grace.