To manage personally and on the spot a provincial, complicated and
rusty machine, always creaking and groaning, to give one's self up to
it, to urge and adjust twenty local wheels, to put up with knocks and
splashes, to become a business man, that is to say a hard worker -
nothing was less desirable for a grand seignior of that epoch. In the
Church as in the State, he made the most of his rank; he collected and
enjoyed its fruits, that is to say money, honors and gratifications,
and, among these gratifications, the principal one, leisure; hence, he
abandoned every special duty, the daily manipulation of men and
things, the practical direction, all effective government, to his
ecclesiastical or lay intendants, to subordinates whom he scarcely
looked after and who, at his own house, on his own domain, replaced
him as fixed residents. The bishop, in his own diocese, left the
administration in the hands of his canons and grand-vicars; "the
official decided without his meddling."[30] The machine thus worked
alone and by itself, with very few shocks, in the old rut established
by routine; he helped it along only by the influence he exercised at
Paris and Versailles, by recommendations to the ministers in reality,
he was merely the remote and worldly representative of his
ecclesiastical principality at court and in the drawing-room.
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