The house built by M. Olier in 1645 was not the large quadrangular barrack-like building which now occupies one side of the square of St. Sulpice.  The old seminary of the seventeenth and eighteenth century covered the whole area of what is now the square, and quite concealed Servandoni’s facade.  The site of the present seminary was formerly occupied by the gardens and by the college of bursars nicknamed the Robertins.  The original building disappeared at the time of the Revolution.  The chapel, the ceiling of which was regarded as Lebrun’s masterpiece, has been destroyed, and all that remains of the old house is a picture by Lebrun representing the Pentecost in a style which would excite the wonder of the author of the Acts of the Apostles.  The Virgin is the centre figure, and is receiving the whole of the pouring out of the Holy Ghost, which from her spreads to the apostles.  Saved at the Revolution, and afterwards in the gallery of Cardinal Fesch, this picture was bought back by the corporation of St. Sulpice, and is now in the seminary chapel.

With the exception of the walls and the furniture, all is old at St. Sulpice, and it is easy to believe that one is living in the seventeenth century.  Time and its ravages have effaced many differences.  St. Sulpice now embodies in itself many things which were once far removed from one another, and those who wish to get the best idea attainable in the present day, of what Port-Royal, the original Sorbonne, and the institutions of the ancient French clergy generally were like, must enter its portals.  When I joined the St. Sulpice seminary in 1843, there were still a few directors who had seen M. Emery, but there were only two, if I remember right, whose memories carried them back to a date earlier than the Revolution.  M. Hugon had acted as acolyte at the consecration of M. de Talleyrand in the chapel of Issy in 1788.  It seems that the attitude of the Abbe de Perigord during the ceremony was very indecorous.  M. Hugon related that he accused himself, when at confession the following Saturday, “of having formed hasty judgments as to the piety of a holy bishop.”  The superior-general, M. Garnier, was more than eighty, and he was in every respect an ecclesiastic of the old school.  He had gone through his studies at the Robertins College and afterwards at the Sorbonne, from which he gave one the idea of just emerging, and when one heard him talk of “Monsieur Bossuet” and “Monsieur Fenelon",[1] it seemed as if one was face to face with an actual pupil of those great men.  There is nothing in common except the name and the dress between these ecclesiastics that of the old regime and those of the present day.  Compared to the young and exuberant members of the Issy school, M. Garnier had the appearance almost of a layman, with a complete absence of all external demonstrations and his staid and reasonable piety.  In the evening, some of the younger students went to keep him company in his room for an hour.