340 Travels in France 



one hand or what the national account will gain on the other. 

 Monsieur Necker calculates their revenue at 130^000,000 livres 

 of which only 42,500,000 livres were in the hands of the :ures oi 

 the kingdom. Their wealth has been much exaggerated : a late 

 writer says they possessed half the kingdom.^ Their number 

 was as little known as their revenue; one writer makes them 

 400,000;^ another 81,400;^ a third 80,000.'^ 



The clergy in France have been supposed by many persons in 

 England to merit their fate from their peculiar profligacy. 

 But the idea is not accurate: that so large a body of men 

 possessed of very great revenues should be free from vice would 

 be improbal^le, or rather impossible; but they preserved, what 

 is not always preserved in England, an exterior decency of be- 

 haviour. — One did not find among them poachers or fox-hunters 

 who, having spent the morning in scampering after hounds, 

 dedicate the evening to the bottle, and reel from inebriety to the 

 pulpit. Such advertisements were never seen in France, as I 

 have heard of in England: — Wmited a curacy in a good, sporting 

 country, where the duty is light and the neighbourhood convivial. 

 The proper exercise for a countr}^ clergyman is the employment 

 of agriculture, which demands strength and activity — and which, 

 vigorously followed, will fatigue enough to give ease its best 

 relish. A sportsman parson may be, as he often is in England, 

 a good sort of man, and an honest fellow ; but certainly this 

 pursuit, and the resorting to obscene comedies, and kicking their 

 heels in the jig of an assembly, are not the occupations for which 

 we can suppose tithes were given .^ Whoever will give any 

 attention to the demands of the clergy in their cahiers will see 

 that there was, on many topics, an ill spirit in that body. They 

 maintain, for instance, that the liberty of the press ought rather 

 to be restrained than extended ; ^ that the laws against it should 

 be renewed and executed : ' that admission into religious orders 



' De I'Autorite de Montesquieu dans la revolution presente, 8vo, 1789, p. 61. 

 — Author's note. 



^ Etats Generaux convoques, par Louis XVI., par M. Target, prem. 

 suite, p. 7. — Author's note. 



^ Qu' est-ce-que Ic Tiers Etai, 3rd. ed. par M. I'Abbe Syeyes. 8vo. p. 51. 

 — Author's note. 



* Bibliothequc de Vhomme publique, par M. Condorcet, etc., torn. iii. — 

 Author's twte. 



•" Nothing appears so scandalous to all the clergy of Europe as their 

 brethren in England dancing at public assemblies; and a bishop's wife 

 engaged in the same amusement seems to them as preposterous as a 

 bishop, in his lawn sleeves, following the same diversion would to us. 

 Probably both are wrong. — Author's note. 



* Saintonge, p. 24. Limoges, p. 6, etc. — Author's note. 

 ' Lyon, p. 13. Dourdon, p. 5. — Author's note. 



