44 Mae Darling 



session. ^^ It was begun, however, and was finished the following 

 Monday.^"*^ 



The hostile attitude of the higher and the lower clergy towards 

 each other is illustrated by an incident related by Coster. He 

 states that during the session of jNIay 8, a cure happened to 

 interrupt the cardinal, and upon being reproved by a bishop who 

 was near, the cure said that he thought the cardinal had finished, 

 and begged pardon for the ofifense. The bishop, however, re- 

 fused to let the matter drop, and at length the cure, completely 

 out of patience, retorted that he would not take reproof from a 

 bishop and that he, the cure, knew quite as well as the bishop 

 what was fitting. Farther on in his account, Coster says that 

 this hostile feeling between the two factions of the clergy was 

 shown still more clearly when one of the bishops having called 

 the cures " sons of peasants," several cures tried to draw up a list 

 of the bishops, with notes regarding their birth, the intention of 

 the cures evidently being to annoy the bishops by showing that 

 they had no reason to boast in regard to their ancestry.^"^ 

 Thomas Jefferson also calls attention to the hostility that existed 

 between the two factions of the clergy. In speaking of the 

 states general in a letter dated May 9, 1789, he says: "It was 

 imagined that the ecclesiastical elections would have been gen- 

 erally in favor of the higher clergy ; on the contrary, the lower 

 clergy have obtained five-sixths of these deputations. These are 

 the sons of peasants who have done all the drudgery of service 

 for ten, twenty and thirty guineas a year, and whose oppressions 

 and penury contrasted with the pride and luxury of the higher 

 clergy, have rendered them perfectly disposed to humble the 



9»Jallet, 53; Thibault, 183. 



^"o/Wrf.; Vallet, Recit, 11; Proccs-verbal historiqne, 45. Thibault ex- 

 plains in detail the method of voting. He says that each member prepared 

 a ballot containing the names of the deputies he wished to vote for and 

 deposited it in a receptacle, after which the}^ were counted by the secre- 

 taries, Dillon and Thibault. The ballots which were still uncounted on 

 Saturday when' the session ended were placed in a vessel (those which had 

 been counted having been publicly burned) and were locked up in a 

 place for safe keeping, the president taking charge of the key. 



1"! Coster, 8 mai. 



246 



