TALLEYRAND
A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY
[Illustration:
_From an engraving after a painting by Gérard._
_Allen H. London, Ltd. &c._
Signature of Talleyrand]
TALLEYRAND
_A Biographical Study_
By
JOSEPH McCABE
_Author of “Peter Abélard,” “Saint Augustine,” &c._
WITH 25 PORTRAITS
INCLUDING A PHOTOGRAVURE FRONTISPIECE
London
Hutchinson & Co.
Paternoster Row
1906
PREFACE
Sainte-Beuve, after an attempt that one cannot describe as successful,
declared that “it is hardly possible to write the life of M. de
Talleyrand.” Frédéric Masson noticed the figure of the great
diplomatist as he passed with a disdainful “ce Sphinx.” Carlyle forgot
his dogmatism for a moment, and pronounced Talleyrand “one of the
strangest things ever seen or like to be seen, an enigma for future
ages.” Even a woman of penetration, Mme. de Staël, who had known
him well, assures us that he was “the most impenetrable and most
inexplicable of men.”
There were a few who thought that the long-sealed “Memoirs” of the
Prince, which were published only a few years ago, would reveal every
secret. They forgot that these were the work of the man who held
(improving on Voltaire) that “speech was given to man to disguise his
thoughts”—the man who conducted his exit from the world with all the
art he had used at the Congress of Vienna. Yet, if the “Memoirs” have
thrown no light, or only a deceptive light, on some of the obscurer
passages in Talleyrand’s career, they have at least filled in our
picture of his personality, so that the tradition of its inscrutability
must be surrendered. There has been a prolonged and microscopic
research into the age or ages of Talleyrand,—the Old Regime, the
Revolution, the Consulate, the Restoration, and the second Revolution.
The memoirs of nearly all his contemporaries have seen the light, and
official records everywhere have been examined. I have made a careful
use of all this research up to date, and find it possible to present a
consistent and intelligible personality.
Lady Blennerhassett included the material of the “Memoirs” in the
biography of Talleyrand that she wrote ten years ago. But a good deal
of light has since been thrown on the earlier part of his career, and
in this regard I gratefully avail myself of the investigations of M.
de Lacombe. Moreover, Lady Blennerhassett is chiefly occupied with the
Prince’s diplomatic action. His personality does not stand out very
clearly from her very crowded canvas. That is an inherent disadvantage
in writing the life of a great diplomatist. However, in spite of the
alluring character of the stretch of history across which the thread
of Talleyrand’s life passes, I have tried to keep it in its place as a
background, and to bring out into the fullest light the elusive figure
of the man who made and unmade a dozen oaths of loyalty.
J. M.
LONDON, _June, 1906_.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE TRAINING OF A DIPLOMATIST 1
II. THE ABBÉ MALGRÉ LUI 16
III. PRIEST AND BISHOP 38
IV. AT THE STATES GENERAL 56
V. THE BREACH WITH THE CHURCH 80
VI. CITIZEN TALLEYRAND 101
VII. EXILE 121
VIII. THE REGENERATED PARIS 141
IX. ENTER NAPOLEON 165
X. WAR AND DIPLOMACY 177
XI. THE RESTORATION OF RELIGION 200
XII. THE RENEWAL OF WAR 223
XIII. AWAY FROM NAPOLEON 251
XIV. THE RESTORATION 281
XV. A DIPLOMATIC ROMANCE 303
XVI. THE “FOREIGNERS OF THE INTERIOR” 326
XVII. THE LAST ACT 349
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This Study is chiefly based on the following Works:
1. Talleyrand’s “Mémoires” (edit, de Broglie, 5 volumes); Official
Correspondence from London in 1792, during the Directoire, during the
Vienna Congress, and from London in 1830-4 (edit. Pallain); Letters
to Napoleon, Mme. Adélaide, D’Hauterive, Choiseul-Gouffier, the
Duchess of Courland, Bacourt, Royer-Collard, Guizot, and others; and
his separately published Speeches and other Documents.
2. “Procès-verbal Historique des Actes du Clergé;” “Procès-verbal de
l’Assemblée Nationale;” “Histoire Parlementaire” (Bouchez et Roux);
and the Memoirs or Letters of Arnault, Barante, Carnot, Consalvi,
von Gagern, Mme. de Genlis, Guizot, Lauzun, Las Cases, Macdonald,
Meneval, Miot de Melito, Morellet, Napoleon, Pasquier, Mme. de
Rémusat, Savary, Senfft, and Stapfer.
3. Of Biographies or Biographical Sketches of Talleyrand the chief
are those by Lady Blennerhassett (the first authority on his
diplomatic career), Brougham, Castellane, Castille, Lacombe (the best
authority on his ecclesiastical career), Sir H. Bulwer Lytton (a very
generous but imperfectly informed study), Mignet, Montarlot, and
Place et Florens. The following writers are too imaginative or too
prejudiced to be of much value: Bastide, Colmache, Marcade, Michaud,
Pichot, Sainte-Beuve, Sallé, Stewartson, Touchard-Lafosse, Vars, and
Villemarest.
4. Subsidiary information has been derived chiefly from “Aus
dem Eheleben eines Bischofs” (anon.); Abt’s “Lebensende des
F. Talleyrand;” Aulard’s “Histoire Politique de la Révolution
Française;” Caro’s “La Fin du XVIII Siècle;” Crétineau-Joly’s
“Bonaparte et le Concordat;” Darcy’s “L’ambassade de Talleyrand
à Londres;” Demaria’s “Benevento sotto il Principe Talleyrand;”
Gazier’s “Etude sur l’Histoire Réligieuse de la Révolution
Française;” Goncourt’s “Histoire de la Société Française Pendant
la Révolution;” Louandre’s “La Noblesse Française sous l’ancienne
Monarchie;” Mongras’ “La fin d’une Société;” Michelet’s “Histoire
de la Révolution;” Rambaud et Levisse’s “Histoire Générale;”
Rose’s “Life of Napoleon I.;” Sloane’s “Life of Napoleon;” Taine’s
“Les Origines de la France Contemporaine;” Thier’s “Révolution,”
“Consulat,” and “Empire.”
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
TALLEYRAND (AFTER GÉRARD) _Photogravure_ _Frontispiece_
TALLEYRAND (A PORTRAIT IN EARLY LIFE) 26
MME. DE GENLIS 30
MARIE ANTOINETTE 46
LOUIS XVI. 54
CAMMILLE DESMOULINS 72
MIRABEAU 102
DANTON 122
MME. DE STAËL 132
MME. TALLEYRAND 148
CARNOT 154
BARRAS 168
SIEYÈS 174
NAPOLEON 182
TALLEYRAND (UNDER NAPOLEON) 190
TALLEYRAND (UNDER NAPOLEON) 210
ALEXANDER I. 248
TALLEYRAND (IN MIDDLE AGE) 274
LOUIS XVIII. 292
PRINCE METTERNICH 306
TALLEYRAND (UNDER LOUIS XVIII.) 340
CHARLES X. 346
LOUIS PHILIPPE 350
TALLEYRAND (AT LONDON, IN 1831) 358
TALLEYRAND (DANTAN’S CARICATURE-BUST) 364
CHAPTER I
THE TRAINING OF A DIPLOMATIST
The life-story of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, as I propose
to write it, begins when, in his third or fourth year, he falls off
a chest of drawers and permanently injures his foot. That wrench of
muscles and tendons, making him limp for life, led to a perverse action
on the part of his educators that did equal violence to an excellent
natural disposition. They say now that the education of a child begins
a hundred years before he is born. In the case of Talleyrand you may
just as well say a thousand. On his father’s side he came of one of
the oldest noble families in France, and his mother was a daughter of
the Marquis d’Antigny. But these hereditary influences only shape the
general contour of his character—give the refinement, the instinct to
rise (Talleyrand, or Tailleran—as Napoleon always pronounced it—is said
to be from “tailler les rangs”), the “sensibility” and “spirituality”
(as people spoke then), the self-possession. When you wish to trace
the growth of the peculiar traits of Prince Talleyrand, you find the
beginning in that fateful fall and dislocation of the foot.
The boy was born in 1754, in the Rue Garancière, at Paris.[1] The week
that followed was the only week he ever spent under the same roof with
his mother, though she lived for fifty years afterwards, and he never
quarrelled with his family. There was no tender rearing, no loving
study and direction of the young life in those days. Rousseau had not
yet persuaded France that a mother’s duty did not end with an impatient
and querulous parturition. Talleyrand’s father and mother were both in
the service of the Court. It was an age when a king could not go to bed
without two or three nobles to hand him his night-dress; and when, on
the other hand, nobles could not live without sharing the king’s purse
to the extent of some forty million livres. Estates had been mortgaged
and starved; Court life had become ever more luxurious and exacting.
The system only held together by a frail structure of privileges,
sinecures and commissions, that bound the nobility closer and closer to
Versailles and left a yawning gulf between them and the people.
That gulf was not to be seen for thirty years yet, and meantime the
life of the idle was swift and strenuous. In such a life the arrival
of children was an accident, a complication. They must at once be put
away to nurse, then to school, and finally be placed in the system.
Lieutenant-General de Talleyrand-Périgord was better than most of
his class, but a busy, and not a wealthy, man. Charles Maurice was
immediately put to nurse in the suburbs, and so successfully forgotten
that when, in his fourth year, it was decided to remove him, he was
found to be lamed for life owing to the unskilful treatment of the
injury to his foot. Through the death of his elder brother he should
have been entitled to the right of primogeniture—the right to the one
good position in the army that could be demanded of the King. But
the thought of a Colonel Talleyrand limping along the galleries at
Versailles or exhibiting an ill-shaped foot on parade was insufferable.
He was destined to the service of the Church. Talleyrand himself
pondered at a later date over the long-drawn consequences of his
accident. When Royalist agents sought his powerful influence for the
restoration of the King, he observed that but for that early mishap he
would probably be with them amongst the _émigrés_ and royal ambassadors.
At the time it fell out his horizon was bounded by the cabbages and
gooseberry bushes of a suburban garden, but in his fourth year he was
transferred to a larger sphere. For seventeen days his wondering eyes
saw the great world unfold before them, as the coach went from Paris
to Bordeaux. A few days later he was in a stately chateau with a very
stately princess caring for him. Little by little he would learn the
idea of lordship. The Princess de Chalais was his great-grandmother,
the representative of a family that had ruled the district for eight
centuries. He saw the homage of her little court, the group of elderly
gentlemen who were no longer needed at brilliant Versailles. He saw
a broad country-side, where not a steeple or monument could catch
his eye but he was told his ancestors had reared it. On Sundays he
saw her courtiers carry her prayer-book in the red velvet bag, and
he knelt on his chair near her _prie-dieu_, and felt the admiring
glances of the peasantry. After mass he saw—he has described it all so
tenderly in his memoirs—the sick and needy of the estate trail after
them to the chateau, where the old lady sat in her velvet chair in
the “dispensary,” and the huge pots of ointment (of which the recipes
were kept in the family) were opened, and two Sisters of Charity
interrogated the applicants, and the Princess cut up the lint and linen
with her own hands, and directed her courtiers to deal out the syrups
and ointments. He saw the old regime at its best.
The four years that the boy spent at Chalais had a deep influence for
good on him. The Princess loved him: she was almost the only one to
awaken his finer feelings in those years of formation, and we shall
find them, recalling those kindly days, long after the terrible ordeal
that was to follow, in the blood-spattered streets of Paris and on the
reeking battle-fields of Napoleon. As he grew up he must have wondered
at times why, through those eight long years he never felt the kiss
of a mother or heard the cheering voice of his distinguished father.
Then he would learn of Paris and Versailles, and how the splendour
of Chalais was only a distant reflection of the life that streamed
out from the capital. At last he was to return to Paris, to see his
parents, to ask by what path _he_ was to enter into that life. He was
eight years old, a sharp, observant, sensitive and ambitious boy.
Then the trial began, and the de-formation of his better instincts.
While his young mind was nervously tracing its large ambition a
family-council was disposing of his body and soul, without a glance at
anything but his foot. A valet met him at the coach-office at Paris
and took him straight to school. Where were his parents? Where was
Versailles? The little lips contracted. He found himself in the dull,
stuffy atmosphere of one of the oldest schools in Paris, the Collège
d’Harcourt (now the Lycée St. Louis). It lay just off the present
Boulevard Michel, its grounds touching those of the Cordeliers. It was
a recognised school for children of good families; in fact, his father
left him to pay in later years for his own education. At dinner on the
first day he sat next to a future ambassador, a nephew of the great
Choiseul. He shared the room and tutor of a cousin. But the teachers
were poor (except his teacher of philosophy), and were chiefly expert
in the “Almanach de la Cour.” In the course of his four years there
Talleyrand picked up a fair acquaintance with the subjects taught at
the time—French history and letters, logic (greatly esteemed at Paris,
and of very obvious influence on his papers afterwards), rhetoric,
Latin, philosophy, and a little mathematics. He was industrious and an
assiduous reader.
Long afterwards his experience of the Collège d’Harcourt was to
lend colour to his denunciation of pre-Revolutionary education.
But the poorness of his intellectual training was the smallest sin
committed against him in those days. The neglect of his character, his
personality, was fatal. An affectionate interest on the part of his
parents might have prepared him for the coming disappointment, but it
was wholly denied. In his memoirs he speaks with a singular respect of
them; at one time he even ventures to suggest that they probably kept
away from him lest, in their great love, they should lose the courage
to carry out the resolution to commit him to the Church! His father
lived until 1788 and his mother until 1809, yet he never spent a week
under the same roof with them. On Sundays one of the teachers would
take him to dine with them, and after a formal hour or two his father
would pat his head and tell him to “be good and obey Monsieur l’Abbé.”
His finer qualities were irreparably neglected. His school-fellows were
good comrades, but the eternal dulness of the place and the restraint
of his parents depressed him. It was not an uncommon experience in
this regard. You find much the same complaint about their school-days
in the memoirs of most of his contemporaries. The particular difficulty
in Talleyrand’s case was the absence of any encouraging words about
the future. By this time he had begun to think about it. Gradually, he
understood hints that it was not the fine halls of Versailles or the
adventures of the camp, but the sombre world of the Church, to which
he was destined. In his twelfth year, about the end of his college
days, he caught the small-pox, and was hurried off to the house of a
strange nurse in the Rue Saint-Jacques. Somehow he survived the deadly
treatment usual at that time—great fires and hermetically-sealed
windows—and escaped marking. But in his convalescence he pondered again
on the absence of his mother.
The time had now come for an open statement about his future. It seems
probable that he was sent then, in 1766, to visit his uncle, who had
just become coadjutor to the Archbishop of Rheims. It is likely enough
that his parents would try to seduce him from military ambition by a
sight of the archbishop-count’s brilliant ecclesiastical court, and
Talleyrand affirms in his memoirs that he was taken from the college
to Rheims. However, it was probably some time later that he spent a
year with his uncle, as he talks of being in his fifteenth year. Mme.
de Genlis says that she saw him at Rheims in his “eleventh or twelfth”
year, but she describes him as wearing a soutane, so that she also
probably refers to a later date. Whether or no he then visited Rheims,
it is clear that in his twelfth or thirteenth year he was sent to Saint
Sulpice, and shrank to find himself in the soutane.
It is hardly necessary to recall that this was a common practice in
the eighteenth century in France, and in many other times and places.
Bossuet and Fénélon had protested religiously against the custom,
but it continued to the full, almost without a single complaint, in
Talleyrand’s day. The effect on the Church itself was disastrous.
Scores of younger or illegitimate sons of the nobility were forced
into it against their inclination, and they adopted within it the
Voltairean scepticism and the looseness of morals which the Army or
the Court would have sanctioned. Just at the crisis of its fortunes
the Church found at its head such men as the Cardinal de Rohan (the
patron of Cagliostro—in exile anent the famous necklace), Loménie
de Brienne and Dillon. It had not spoken a syllable of protest when
they were presented to it for ordination, for the sole purpose of
securing the revenues, and neglecting the duties, of its rich abbeys
and bishoprics. Loménie de Brienne, in fact, had deliberately chosen
the Church as the best path for his ambition, and resigned the secular
primogeniture. During the years of preparation for the Church he was
designing the plan of his archi-episcopal chateau and dreaming of the
political leadership of the country. Most of them, like Talleyrand,
were put into the Church so as to relieve the strain on the king’s
coffers at its expense. It had been decided, and was afterwards
formally decreed, that no commission in the army should be given to
any but a noble, and still the supply was excessive; though the King’s
personal service cost forty million livres a year, and that of the
Queen a further five millions. Then they turned to the Church, with
its income of 150,000,000 livres a year, as a field for younger sons.
Wealthy bishoprics were appropriated to the nobility, and wealthy
abbeys—the income of the Abbot of Saint Germain at Paris was 130,000 a
year—were handed over to them as _abbés commendataires_, which might be
translated “absentee landlords.”
But I will return presently to the character of the clergy on the eve
of the Revolution. Though wealth and prestige and political power were
to be had in the clerical profession, the young Talleyrand bitterly
resented his situation. By a healthy instinct he felt that, as later
experience showed, he was totally unfitted for the Church. Hence
he quickly developed a habit of silent and cynical observation, of
disregard for authority and conventional ideals, and of unhealthy
isolation and self-possession. Many years afterwards an emigrant
bishop, who had been a schoolfellow of his at Saint Sulpice, recalled
how he used to say to his one or two close friends: “They want to
make a priest of me, but they will have an unpleasant time of it.”
He himself says that he hardly spoke a word during the first three
years at the seminary. His recreation hours were spent in its
splendid library, where he sought especially the lives of statesmen
“and moralists,” works of travel and adventure, and books that
described all kinds of violent movements and upheavals in Nature and
the social order. He had not the temperament of a revolutionary; his
experience and reading led rather to a complete atrophy of his power
of devotion to an idea or an institution. In his theology he would
read how the service of religion demanded perfect ministers—“victims
without blemish,” in the words of the Church; yet his superiors blandly
accepted those who were rejected by army or Court. He saw injustice and
hypocrisy on every side, and concluded that loyalty and devotion were
masks. So, as time went on, he retreated more and more within himself,
made his own interest the measure of his acquiescence, and learned the
essential qualities of a diplomatist. In later years he saw advantages
in the training. It was well to have been thus “dipped in the waters
of the Styx.” He never spoke or wrote a harsh word of his parents,[2]
or of Saint Sulpice, or of the Church. “Well, God keep his soul, but I
like him,” said Pius VII of Talleyrand, after his first struggle with
Napoleon.
After two or three years at Saint Sulpice he was sent on a long visit
to his uncle at Rheims. Archbishop Talleyrand (he was then Archbishop
_in partibus_) was a conscientious and high-minded prelate, who
suffered much in after years from the conduct of his favourite nephew.
He tried to reconcile the boy with his profession. The Archbishop of
Rheims, the Count de la Roche-Aymon, was a prelate of dignity and
intellect, and an imposing figure at archi-episcopal functions. With
his episcopal income and the Abbey of Saint-Germain-aux-Près (a total
annual income of 180,000 livres), besides private means, he was not
one of the wealthiest prelates, but his see was of great importance,
and his splendour would have dazzled a youth with any disposition to
the clerical career. But the encouragement of the two prelates and all
the glory of their functions were quite lost on young Talleyrand. He
says in his memoirs that all this prestige did not seem to him “worth
the sacrifice of his sincerity.” That is obviously an after-thought.
It was an instinctive consciousness of his unfitness for the celibate
state and for religious ministry that moved him. Madame de Genlis saw
him at Sillery with his uncle, and noticed the pale, silent boy, with
the observant eyes, in soutane and skull cap. He probably noticed
Madame de Genlis in return, if he did not hear something about that
charming compound of philosophic virtue and plebeian vice. A few such
acquaintances and a few small ecclesiastical dignities were all he ever
acquired at Rheims.
He says that his uncle put in his way the lives of Richelieu and
Ximenes and Hincmar, and the memoirs of Retz, to show that the
ecclesiastical life had possibilities. He would hardly need
assistance in discovering those helpful books. Now that the Church
_must_ be embraced he formed his own view of it. It should serve as
a back-door to the pleasant world from which they would exclude him.
He would rejoin young Choiseul and Madame de Genlis by-and-by. It
is a rather curious commentary on his training at this time that a
shrewd adventuress, who saw a good deal of him under the Directorate,
described him as a mixture of Richelieu’s firmness, Mazarin’s finesse,
de Retz’s versatility, and a little of de Rohan’s gallantry. He may
have heard, too, of that questionable ancestor of his in the fourteenth
century, the Cardinal Hélie de Périgord, in whose titular Church
at Rome an inscription recorded that “he was weak in religion but
assiduous in worldly things.” Cardinal Hélie, a friend of Petrarch, had
become an influential politician, had made a large fortune in commerce,
and had spent it pleasantly in the patronage of art and luxury.
These ideas would take shape in time, as he resigned himself to the
ecclesiastical condition. In the circumstances such a resignation could
only take one form. Month by month the restless youth, with the whole
adventurous history of the Périgords in his veins, would contrast
the dullness of his surroundings with the dream of his boyhood. Had
there been a profound and general religious sentiment in the place,
his earlier vision might have been obliterated; but Voltaireanism was
in even the atmosphere of Saint Sulpice. There were good and sincere
priests in the French Church then, as ever, but some of its most
prominent representatives were known sceptics, and Hume and Voltaire
were read in the seminaries. In through the windows of his prison,
too, would come the laughter of Paris, the sound of the bugle, the
flash of the passing nobility. A youth devoid of any natural religious
disposition, with a horror of ascetic plainness and heavy religious
formalism, with a quick, inborn faculty of irony, with a sensuous
element just beginning to stir in his blood, and a temperamental
craving for woman’s society, could never serve the Church. The Church
must serve him. He did not discuss his moods with anyone. To most of
his companions he was morose and taciturn. To his superiors he was
a problem. One of his school-fellows used to tell in later years[3]
how on one occasion he was reading in the refectory, and he came to a
passage: “And when the Chateau Tropette.” The superior corrected him,
and said “Trompette.” Talleyrand coolly repeated the passage, and was
again corrected. He read it a third time, and quickly ran on before
the superior could speak, “the Chateau Tropette, which the ignorant
have hitherto called the Chateau Trompette.” We can well imagine that a
discreet contempt of authority and disdain of zeal were growing in him.
After a time he found the inevitable (and not unusual) means to enliven
the dulness of Saint Sulpice. He was leaving the church one rainy
morning when he noticed a pretty girl without an umbrella. He offered
a share of his, escorted her home, and they saw each other nearly
every day for a long time. They were both rebels. She had been sent on
the stage against her wish. This is the only irregularity Talleyrand
confesses to at that time, and there is no serious ground for
entertaining the wild stories of gambling and liaisons. The soundness
of them may be judged from the circumstance that they suppose his
father to have died some time before (alleging that an _uncle_ shuts
him in the Bastille), whereas the father lived for seventeen years
afterwards. The seminary authorities were not unwilling to purchase a
brighter disposition in their pupil at the price. Talleyrand hints,
too, that their liberality had some regard for his connections and
prospects.
This episode belongs to his eighteenth year. It is the only authentic
detail we have about his life after his stay at Rheims in 1769 until
1774. In that year we find him (in the records consulted by M. de
Lacombe) competing for what we should call a fellowship at the
Sorbonne. The thesis he sustained there on September 22nd was very
edifying and successful. “What science is most fitted for the lips of
the priest?” was the question he undertook to answer, and the published
discourse was piously dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was his first
essay in diplomacy. For priestly ideals he cared not a tittle. But
the world seemed to make it a curious condition of success to do this
sort of thing, a polite recognition of the particular ante-chamber to
public life in which you found yourself. The maxims of Richelieu and De
Retz had taken root. The conditions of advancement were repugnant to
him, but they were not chosen by him. As a young man of culture in a
philosophic age, he could not be expected to take religion seriously.
He had read much more of Hume and Locke, of Montaigne and Voltaire,
than of Suarez. He became a bachelor of theology, and drew near to the
end of his dreary residence in the seminary.