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406 the Third Estate, and wished that the King would dissolve the Assembly and summon another on different lines, with a definite plan of action, which Talleyrand had prepared. He took the lead in discarding instructions and the division of the orders ; but, after the fall of the Bastille, he, with his friends, called on Louis the Sixteenth to adopt their policy. At midnight, on the 16th of July, he roused the Count of Artois, explained to him during two hours what would happen if the unresisted Assembly was allowed to send France down the entire cataract of deductive logic, and made him get out of bed and carry the ultimatum to the King. Louis, judging that this was a bid for office by a man who had given no extraordinary proof of capacity, and who in public had taken the opposite line of submission to the majority, rejected the warning, and the Count came back, protesting that the game was lost and that he would be off for the frontier in the morning. Talleyrand vainly dissuaded him from emigrating. At last he said, "Then, sir, as the King and the princes abandon the monarchy, nothing remains for us but to shift for ourselves." Twenty-five years later when, as head of the Government, he invited the Count to return, he was able to remind him that the advice he had given at their last meeting was good.

The famous decree with which Talleyrand is identified, though it altered fundamentally the conditions of religion in France, was a financial measure, not the outcome of a scheme of Church government. At a Conference held in May, the Archbishop of Aries made, with applause, the insane proposal that they should take the opportunity to have the debt of the clergy paid by the State. It was soon apparent that the clergy would be called on to supply the deficit of the State, and after the 4th of August, and the abolition of tithes, the property of the Church could not be saved. As soon as the assembly had removed to Paris, the Bishop of Autun, quick to recognise the inevitable, moved that the nation should take over the Church property, allowing a pension exceeding by a million sterling that which is now paid,