lity and the clergy united should bind the Third
Estate, any joint vote of the Third Estate with either of the other two
orders should bind them all. Here, long before the much-bewritten date
of 1789, we have the Church in Artois arraying itself on the side of the
tax-paying people against the privileged classes. Modern inquiries show,
indeed, that this was the attitude of the great body of the French
clergy long before what is called the 'Revolution.' The majority of the
representatives of the clergy in the States-General of 1789 did not wait
for the theatrical demonstrations in the Tennis Court of Versailles,
about which so much nonsense has been talked and written, to join the
Third Estate in insisting upon a real reform of the public service. No
French historian has ventured to make such a picture of the Catholic
clergy of France under the Bourbons as Lord Macaulay thought himself
authorised to paint of the Protestant clergy of England under the
Stuarts. There were flagrant scandals among the higher orders of the
Church in France, no doubt, as there were in England. The names of
Dubois, of Lomenie de Brienne, of De Rohan are not associated with the
cardinal virtues. De Jarente, Bishop of Orleans, driving Mdlle. Guimard
to the opera in his coronetted and mitred coach, is not an edifying
figure, nor is Louis de Grimaldi, Bishop of Mans, saying Mass in his red
hunting-coat and breeches. But the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick's
thought the execution for felony of another Protestant dean a capital
theme for a merry ballad; and at the end of the eighteenth century
Arthur Young painted the English rural clergy in very dark colours. The
curates, the rectors, the monks of France as a body, showed under the
old regime the same qualities of devout faith and Christian sympathy
with the people with which they met and baffled their persecutors after
the crash of the monarchy. The three representatives of the clergy who
first struck hands with the Third Estate on June 13, 1789, were curates
sent to Paris by a province more intensely Catholic than Artois. They
were Poitevin priests from the region which we now know as La Vendee,
and which only four years afterwards rose in arms to defend its altars
and its homes against the intolerable despotism of the 'patriots' of
Paris.

When Turgot was put in charge of that work of fiscal reform which might
have spared France the horrors and the disasters of the Revolution, had
Louis XVI. been