politeness, the little _abbes_ of French biography and fiction.
These men lived in garrets, haunted cheap eating-houses, and appeared on
certain days of the week at rich men's tables, picking up a living as
best they could. They were to be seen among the tradesmen and suitors
who crowded the levees of the great, distinguishable in the throng by
their black clothes, and a very small tonsure. They attended the toilets
of fashionable ladies, ever ready with the last bit of literary gossip,
or of social scandal. They sought employment as secretaries, or as
writers for the press. The church, or indeed, the opposite party, could
find literary champions among them at a moment's notice. Nor was hope of
professional preferment always lacking. It is said that one of the
number kept an ecclesiastical intelligence office. This man was
acquainted with the incumbents of valuable livings; he watched the state
of their health, and calculated the chances of death among them. He knew
what patrons were likely to have preferment to give away, and how those
patrons were to be reached. His couriers were ever on the road to Rome,
for the Pope still had the gift of many rich places in France, in spite
of the Concordat.[Footnote: Mercier, ix. 350.]

Another large part of the revenues of the church was devoted to the
support of the convents. These contained from sixty to seventy thousand
persons, more of them women than men. Owing to various causes, and
especially to the action of a commission appointed to examine all
convents, and to reform, close, or consolidate such as might need to be
so treated, the number of regular religious persons fell off more than
one half during the last twenty-five years of the monarchy. Yet many of
the functions which in modern countries are left to private charity, or
to the direct action of the state, were performed in old France by
persons of this kind. The care of the poor and sick and the education of
the young were largely, although not entirely, in the hands of religious