MONSIEUR DE TALLEYRAND

WHO is there who does not know a score or so of the bon-mots of M. de Talleyrand? And possibly since the days when articulately speaking men, the μéрones avОpúо of old Homer, first began to be intelligible to each other, no human being ever uttered so many invariably smart things of first-rate merit. The interest in this enigmatical character has been a good deal revived by late publications. People who knew him in the flesh, like Lord Dalling and M. Amédée Pichot, the philo-Anglican editor of the Revue Britannique, and the deceased great French critic Sainte-Beuve, have all contributed something of worth to what may be called the Talleyrandian literature, and with these productions we are obliged to content ourselves for our knowledge of him for the present; for the Mémoires of the wily diplomatist, which his contemporaries had expected would be published in 1868-thirty years after his death -cannot, it appears by the terms of his will, be given to the world. till the year of grace 1888, when none who knew him will probably be in existence, and a good many of us who did not know him may never live to read them.

We have styled him an enigmatical personage, and such assuredly he was. The moral problem,' says Sainte-Beuve, which the character of Talleyrand arouses in us consists altogether, so far as its extraordinary and original nature is concerned, in a union, assuredly singular and unique in its kind, of a great intelligence, a clear good sense, and an exquisite taste, with the most consummate corruption, disdain, laisser aller, and superciliousness.'

In fact of this we may be sure, that the world will never again see the like of this extraordinary character, who preserved imperturbably the allures of a grand seigneur of the old régime amid the astonishing changes of fortune, fashion, and manners which befell France in his day, and managed to thrive under them all. Under Louis XV., under Louis XVI., under the first French Republic, under the terrible frown of Napoleon, behind the chairs of the fatuous and self-satisfied Louis XVIII. and of the stolid Charles X., as minister and counsellor too of the bourgeois monarch Louis XVIII., M. de Talleyrand was still the same wily, self-dependent, never-to-besurprised M. de Talleyrand, as much at home and on the same good terms with himself in favour or out of favour, and utterly indifferent as to which master he served. Though he was consecrated a bishop in early life, he made as light of his consecration as he did of the

title of Prince of Benevento, thrust upon him by Napoleon; he was ever M. de Talleyrand, in spite of popes and republics, kings and emperors; and if the world had fallen in ruins around him, M. de Talleyrand would have been sure to have saved himself somehow or other, and awaited a new order of things with perfect equanimity.

nurse.

The circumstances of Talleyrand's birth and childhood no doubt had a good deal to do with the creation of so strange and anomalous a character. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand was born in Paris in 1754, of a family which laid claim to be descended from a younger branch of the ancient sovereign counts of Périgord. He was throughout life lame of one foot, and it is uncertain whether his lameness was of natural origin, or was the result of a fall while he was at One account, professing to have been taken from Talleyrand's own lips, states that he was left under a hedge by his nurse, and that his leg was badly bitten by pigs, and suffered permanent injury. In any case, his own mother could not endure the sight of her lame offspring; so he was left with his foster-mother at a country village for three or four years. His uncle, the bailli de Périgord, a naval officer, wishing to see what his little nephew was like, went to find him at the village where he was left, almost forgotten. He found the child running about dirty and ragged in the fields in company with a little foster-brother as ragged as himself. The bailli de Périgord took his little nephew just as he was, and planted him down in the centre of his mother's Parisian salon as she was receiving some great lady visitors. 'My sister,' said the bailli, this is the descendant in a direct line of the Princes of Chalais; he bears arms-three lions or, armed and crowned, a field gules, a prince's crown on escutcheon, and a ducal crown on his mantle; and his motto is, Re que Diou, which means, "Nothing but God above us." Go, monseigneur my nephew, kiss that fine lady, she is your mother.' Charles Maurice, indeed, was the eldest son of the family; but on account of his lameness it was decided in a conseil de famille that his younger brother Archambaud, afterwards Duc de Périgord, should be adopted as heir, and that the elder son should be brought up to the Church. Talleyrand was thirteen or fourteen when this decision was arrived at; and as he was a precocious boy, and had a rooted objection to the ecclesiastical calling, there can be no doubt the way in which he was thus sacrificed combined with the neglect of his childhood to give a wrench to his character from which it never recovered. He ran away from the first school to which he was sent the Collége d'Harcourt— because he was threatened with the birch; but his father said to him on his appearance at home, Monsieur mon fils, one of our ancestors, Henri de Talleyrand, Comte de Chalais, was brought up in his childhood with Louis XIII., who never forgot that his comrade had often been flogged in his stead. You will not, then, be