Salvation 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_.
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