onstitutional" bishops, allowing them every facility for free speech
in a council which they held at Paris at the close of June, 1801. He
summoned to the Tuileries their president, the famous Gregoire, and
showed him signal marks of esteem. "Put not your trust in princes"
must soon have been the thought of Gregoire and his colleagues: for a
fortnight later Bonaparte carried through his treaty with Rome and
shelved alike the congress and the church of the "constitutionals."

It would be tedious to detail all the steps in this complex
negotiation, but the final proceedings call for some notice. When the
treaty was assuming its final form, Talleyrand, the polite scoffer,
the bitter foe of all clerical claims, found it desirable to take the
baths at a distant place, and left the threads of the negotiation in
the hands of two men who were equally determined to prevent its
signature, Maret, Secretary of State, and Hauterive, who afterwards
become the official archivist of France. These men determined to
submit to Consalvi a draft of the treaty differing widely from that
which had been agreed upon; and that, too, when the official
announcement had been made that the treaty was to be signed
immediately. In the last hours the cardinal found himself confronted
with unexpected conditions, many of which he had successfully
repelled. Though staggered by this trickery, which compelled him to
sign a surrender or to accept an open rupture, Consalvi fought the
question over again in a conference that lasted twenty-four hours; he
even appeared at the State dinner given on July 14th by the First
Consul, who informed him before the other guests that it was a
question of "my draft of the treaty or none at all." Nothing baffled
the patience and tenacity of the Cardinal; and finally, by the good
offices of Joseph Bonaparte, the objectionable demands thrust forward
at the eleventh hour were removed or altered.

The question has been discussed whether the First Consul was a party
to this device. Theiner asserts that he knew nothing of it: that it
was an official intrigue got up at the last moment by the
anti-clericals so as to precipitate a rupture. In support of this
view, he cites letters of Maret and Hauterive as inculpating these men
and tending to free Bonaparte from suspicion of complicity. But the
letters cannot be said to dissipate all suspicion. The First Consul
had made this negotiation peculiarly his own: no officials assuredly
wou