lvation is left to the chances of the eleventh
hour. Time pressed, and it was resolved to play a bold game. M.
Dupanloup was waiting in the next room, and he sent the winsome
daughter of the Duchesse de Dino, of whom Talleyrand was always so
fond, to ask if he might come in. The answer, for a wonder, was in the
affirmative, and the priest spent several minutes with him,
bringing out from the sick-room a paper signed "Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand-Perigord, Prince de Benevent."

There was joy--if not in heaven, at all events in the Catholic world
of the Faubourgs St. Germain and St. Honore. The credit of this
victory was ascribed, in the main, to the female grace which had
succeeded in getting round the aged prince, and inducing him to
retract the whole of his revolutionary past, but some of it went to
the youthful ecclesiastic who had displayed so much tact in bringing
to a satisfactory conclusion a project in which it was so easy to
fail. M. Dupanloup was from that day one of the first of French
priests. Position, honours, and money were pressed upon him by the
wealthy and influential classes in Paris. The money he accepted, but
do not for a moment suppose that it was for himself, as there never
was any one so unselfish as M. Dupanloup. The quotation from the Bible
which was oftenest upon his lips, and which was doubly a favourite
one with him because it was truly Scriptural and happened to terminate
like a Latin verse was: _Da mihi animas; cetera tolle tibi_. He had
at that time in his mind the general outlines of a grand propaganda by
means of classical and religious education, and he threw himself
into it with all the passionate ardour which he displayed in the
undertakings upon which he embarked.

The seminary Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet, situated by the side of
the church of that name, between the Rue Saint Victor and the Rue de
Pontoise, had since the Revolution been the petty seminary for the
diocese of Paris. This was not its primitive destination. In the great
movement of religious reform which occurred during the first half of
the seventeenth century, and to which the names of Vincent de Paul,
Olier, Berulle, and Father Eudes are attached, the church of Saint
Nicholas du Chardonnet filled, though in a humbler measure, the same
part as Saint Sulpice. The parish of Saint Nicholas, which derived its
name from a field of thistles well known to students at the University
of Paris in the middle ages, was then th