What she was losing hope of, a fraction of the clergy set themselves to win. There was, among the mass of cassocked peasants and rochetted aristocrats, a small group of cultivated men drawing its inspiration from the Cardinal of Amboise,[133] less audacious than Rome, less retrograde than Germany. These recognised the traditional merits of military glory, birth, and money, but would have liked to reconcile them with the newer virtues, blend them together into one radiance, homogeneous like the sunbeam, which is composed of colours so various; they would have liked to see all these glories combining, as at Rome, into one rainbow-like effulgence. A monk of Cluny, Clichtoue, begs, beseeches well-born young men to shun the enervating paths of infatuation, idleness and vice. He has endless examples showing the possibility of alliance between literary tastes[134] and the military life; he reveres the principles of rank so highly as to discern them in application everywhere, even among the metals; but he longs ardently to bind into one sheaf all the vital forces of society; he is a philosopher, one may even say a sort of John the Baptist. He proclaims Plato; he is more scriptural than Luther, and has as much antique culture as any Roman prelate;[135] to him the future seems to outline itself clearly. “After virtue,” he says, “a noble can have no comelier ornament than letters. Philosophy is not the recipient, but the source of nobility.” He adjures distinguished men to pay real attention to the social obligations incumbent on them, under penalty of losing their rank. He does not disavow the natural pleasure a man takes in the thought that he has had ancestors and will have descendants, but to him this does not seem a sufficient though an honourable aim in life. If no means are found of uniting the two nobilities, that of the body and that of the mind, no doubt (in his opinion) the nobility of the mind will get the upper hand; Solomon, who is not generally considered a modern or even a socialist, had already said so long ago: “I myself also am mortal, like to other men, and am sprung from the terrestrial lineage of the first man. And in the womb of a mother was I moulded into flesh. And I also, when I was born, drew in the common air and fell upon the kindred earth, uttering, like all men, for my first voice the self-same wail: in swaddling clothes was I nursed, and with watchful cares. Who among the kings had any other beginning? All men have one entrance into life, and a like departure.”