princes, gave his opinion of this strange portion of French society with
much more promptitude than he probably would of the probable fall or rise
of stocks.

"Of all the gamblers at the great gambling-table of France," said he, "the
clergy have played their game the worst. By leaving their defence to the
throne, they have only dragged down the throne. By relying on the good
sense of the National Assembly, they have left themselves without a
syllable to say. Like men pleading by counsel, they have been at the mercy
of their counsel, and been ruined at once by their weakness and their
treachery."

On my observing to him that the church of France was necessarily feebler
than either the throne or the nobles, and that, therefore, its natural
course was to depend on both--

"Rely upon it," said the keen Jew "that any one great institution of the
state which suffers itself, in the day of danger, to depend on any other
for existence, will be ruined. When all are pressed, each will be glad to
get rid of the pressure, by sacrificing the most dependent. The church
should have stood on its own defence. The Gallican hierarchy was, beyond
all question, the most powerful in Europe. Rome and her cardinals were
tinsel and toys to the solid strength of the great provincial clergy of
France. They had numbers, wealth, and station. Those things could give
influence among a population of Hottentots. Let other hierarchies take
example. They threw them all away, at the first move of a bloody
handkerchief on the top of a Parisian pike. They had vast power with the
throne; but what had once been energy they turned into encumbrance, and if
the throne is pulled down, it will be by their weight. They had a third of
the land in actual possession, and they allowed themselves to be stripped
of it by a midnight vote of a drunken assembly. If they were caricatured
in Paris, they had three-fourths of the population as fast bound to them
as bigotry and their daily bread could bind. Three months ago, they might
have marched to Paris with their crucifixes in front, and three millions
of stout peasantry in their rear, have captured the capital, and fricaseed
the foolish legislature. And now, they have archbishops learning to live
on a shilling a-day."

From the Horse guards I had yet obtained nothing, but promises of "being
remembered on the first vacancy;" Clotilde was still a sufferer, and my
time, like that of every man without an object, began to b