Note 20 — Chapter II · Saints and Barbarians

The episcopal palace as it now stands is a handsome eighteenth-century red brick building, and was built by the Bishop de Fleury in 1760. Vast and sumptuous, with its Italian portico and flights of steps, with its gardens of which you see but a small part through the grille which opens on the cloister near the north porch of the Cathedral, with its wing ‘de la Duchesse,’ as it was called after the Duchesse de Fleury, mother of the bishop, and the wing built in 1702, wherein are the immense reception-rooms, this palace, regal almost in its size and magnificence, suggests the temporal and spiritual power of the prelates who numbered among their vassals the highest barons of the realm and whose diocese was known at Rome as the Great Bishopric. But it is little in accord with the life or the means of the twentieth-century bishops, to whom, as to their Anglican brethren, the palaces they have to maintain are usually white elephants.