of its duty and charity, living in the world to console and edify
it, without mingling in its joys and passions--but a clergy such
as intrigue, cupidity, and ambition had made it; that is to say,
the court abbes, rivalling the Roman priests, indolent, libertine,
elegant, impudent, kings of fashion, autocrats of the salon,
kissing the hands of those ladies of whom they boasted themselves
the paramours, giving their hands to kiss to the women of the
people whom they honored by making their mistresses.

Do you want a type of those abbes? Take the Abbe Maury. Proud
as a duke, insolent as a lackey, the son of a shoemaker, more
aristocratic than the son of a great lord.

One understands that these two categories of inhabitants,
representing the one heresy, the other orthodoxy; the one the
French party, the other the Roman party; the one the party of
absolute monarchy, the other that of progressive constitutionalism,
were not elements conducive to the peace and security of this
ancient pontifical city. One understands, we say, that at the
moment when the revolution broke out in Paris, and manifested
itself by the taking of the Bastille, that the two parties, hot
from the religious wars of Louis XIV., could not remain inert
in the presence of each other.

We have said, Avignon, city of priests; let us add, city of hatreds.
Nowhere better than in convent towns does one learn to hate. The
heart of the child, everywhere else free from wicked passions,
was born there full of paternal hatreds, inherited from father to
son for the last eight hundred years, and after a life of hate,
bequeathed in its turn, a diabolical heritage, to his children.