THE ABBÉ MALGRÉ LUI
It will hardly be thought that up to this point there is any mystery
about the person of Talleyrand. Many types of character were produced
by this enforcement of the ecclesiastical profession. A few youths
were touched by the better influences of their surroundings, and nobly
turned to the great models of Bossuet and Fénélon. A large number
drifted impatiently through the seminary, enlivened it with frequent
dips into the stream of Parisian life, and emerged as the philosophic
abbés and bishops we shall meet presently, ecclesiastical only in
title and purse. Many worked silently and steadily through the years
of study with a more or less clear political ideal always in mind,
using the general education of the priest and the specific training
of a systematised theology for their ulterior purposes. Such were
Sieyès, Talleyrand, Fouché, Louis, Montesquiou, Daunou, Reinhard,
La Besnardière. It might have been predicted at an early stage
that Talleyrand would fall in the third class. Then the peculiarly
painful circumstances of his exclusion from the more natural career,
which he so much desired, would make him independent, self-centred,
calculating, lightly cynical. Add a reasoned disbelief in religious
teaching (though it is impossible to say when this began), and we can
surely understand Talleyrand in his twentieth year, gravely discussing
priestly qualities from the Sorbonne pulpit, while his heart is at
Versailles. But we are a long way advanced in the work of interpreting
our “Sphinx.”
About the close of Talleyrand’s course of study at the seminary, Louis
XVI was to be crowned at Rheims, and Talleyrand’s parents invited
him to assist at the ceremony. His father was to have a function in
the proceedings, and his uncle would anoint the sovereign if, as
was feared, the aged Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon was unable to do
so. But this effort of Talleyrand’s parents to interest him in his
vocation only shows once more how far they were from understanding his
character. Looking back on that splendid spectacle of the coronation
through the ghastly fires of the Revolution, Talleyrand said that
“never did so brilliant a spring presage so stormy an autumn, so dire
a winter.” No doubt there were statesmen present who tried to look up
the darkening avenue, and wondered how the honest young king and his
beautiful queen would meet the dangers that were gathering over the
impoverished country. To Sub-Deacon Talleyrand[4] the spectacle must
have held another element of tragedy. At the time it probably only
afforded him a tantalising vision of the gay world from which they
would exclude him. Such prestige as the priest had, with his golden
cope and sacramental oil and theatrical asceticism, was the last kind
he would think of seeking. No doubt he was aware that it was an age of
compromise. He would see archbishops (such as Dillon and De Brienne),
and bishops and abbés without number, who had their _belles amies_ and
boxes at the opera. The sight of them made the Church less intolerable.
He made their acquaintance, was introduced to some of the great
ladies of Paris—the Duchess de Luynes, the Duchess de Fitz-James, the
Viscountess de Laval, and others. His conversation seems to have shown
already some of the sparkle which made it so much sought later. He
pleased. Some of the most fashionable salons were open to him, as soon
as the Church should provide him with an income.
The income was on its way. The story usually runs that Talleyrand was
one day in the salon of Mme. du Barry with a lively group of young
nobles. She noticed his silence, and asked what he was thinking of.
“Alas! madame,” he is reported to have said, “I was thinking how much
easier it is to get an _amie_ than an _abbaye_ at Paris.” The story
concludes that he was at once rewarded with the abbey of St. Denis,
at Rheims, with a revenue of 18,000 livres.[5] As a fact, Talleyrand
did not see the inside of Versailles until two or three years after
the death of Louis XV, and the disappearance of Mme. du Barry. He did
not become _abbé_ until more than a year later, and was not ordained
priest until much later still. M. de Lacombe has patiently traced his
early movements in the ecclesiastical records at Rheims and Paris, and
we are able to set aside most of the legends of his precocious gaiety.
However, he had already begun to climb the ladder of ecclesiastical
preferment. In January he had been made (while yet in minor orders)
chaplain of the lady-chapel in the parish church at Rheims. He then
received the sub-deaconate, and immediately after the coronation he
was chosen by the clergy of Rheims to represent them at the General
Assembly of the clergy. This was a singular distinction for one of his
age, barely in sacred orders (though one other sub-deacon figures in
the list of deputies), and it compels us to suppose that he had won
some attention. A General Assembly of the Clergy met at Paris, as a
rule, every five years, to discuss the more important affairs of the
French Church. Each ecclesiastical province sent four delegates, two of
the order of prelates and two of the lower clergy, and they sat from
four to six months, discussing their financial and political relation
to the State, as well as questions of discipline and religion.
For those who would understand the conduct of Talleyrand in later
years, especially his “betrayal” of the Church, it is necessary to
see these scenes of his earlier clerical days as he saw them. In the
seminary he had learned the stately Catholic ideal of the priest, but
had noted with even keener eye how ready the Church was to compromise
with it. At Rheims he had seen clearly enough the relations of prelates
and duchesses, the price by which the Church retained its prestige
in a Voltairean world. At Paris the comedy—rapidly dissolving into
tragedy—would continue. In the convent of the Grands-Augustins the
thirty-two prelates, in rich surplices, sit in their thirty-two
fauteuils; behind each prelate sits, on a “chair with a back,” the
corresponding delegate of the lower clergy in black mantle and square
bonnet. The first great question is: How much is the King going to ask
of us? For years jurists and politicians, and latterly philosophers,
had murmured at the exemption of the clergy from taxation. The Church
had only retained its privilege by paying a few millions at each
assembly in the form of a “gratuitous gift.” But the amount of the
gift was fixed by the King, and it would fare ill with the clergy if
they refused it. In the increasing financial distress the “gifts” grew
larger and more frequent. At this particular Assembly in July, 1775,
the King’s messengers announce that he asks sixteen millions[6] of his
devoted clergy. Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon, the president, informs
them that they lay the sum at his feet—reminding him, however, of his
promise at the last Assembly to moderate his demands—and the messengers
withdraw.
Then the founts of clerical rhetoric are opened. Talleyrand observes in
his memoirs that “the intervention of conscience in these money matters
gave the speeches a kind of eloquence that is peculiarly at the command
of the clergy.” The Archbishop of Auch (with 120,000 a year from his
bishopric alone) is deputed to express the common feeling. They are
personally most eager to help their country, but the resources they
control belong to the service of God and the altar. Is not the King
confusing their goods with the monies of “profane commerce”? They sink
under “immense burdens,” and are “exhausted” with gratuitous gifts.
[The Church has an income of 150,000,000 livres a year.] Cardinal de
la Roche-Aymon (with one religious sinecure alone worth 130,000 a
year) nods acquiescence. Archbishop Dillon (160,000 a year and odd
sinecures), Archbishop de Brienne (only 90,000 as yet—he is not yet
Prime Minister), Archbishop de la Rochefoucauld (100,000), and the
other prelates agree. Hardly a delegate but is _abbé commendataire_ of
some place or other. The abbacy of St. Bernard’s historic monastery,
where the monks once ate the leaves of the forest, is worth 400,000 a
year. The Benedictines of Saint-Maur (1,672 in number) have a revenue
of 8,000,000 livres. Cardinal Prince de Rohan has a total income of
2,500,000 a year, and is heavily in debt. So is Dillon, who spends
six months of each year in hunting, and a great deal of the rest in
less healthy occupation. However, they will contrive to find sixteen
millions this time—and trust the King will return it in other ways. The
Abbé de Périgord,[7] pale, silent, in black mantle and square bonnet,
observes it all, and makes (internally) reflections on venerable
institutions and “zeal.”
In the course of the sittings several other questions came on that were
not without irony. Chief amongst these were the decay of the monastic
orders and the growth of infidelity and Protestantism. Some of the
most powerful prelates in the Assembly, as well as many deputies of
the second order, were Voltairean in opinion and less than Voltairean
in practice. All joined in the appeals to King and Pope to reform or
suppress the corrupt and decaying monastic bodies, to stem the flood
of philosophic literature, and to arrest the growth of Protestantism.
They were honest at least in their attack on monasticism. It was one
of the ideas of the philosophers, and was rapidly spreading amongst
the people. Hardly a day passed now without an attack on them, and
Talleyrand says that not a pen was lifted in their defence during
the twenty years preceding the Revolution. At the States-General
in 1789 one peasant deputy arrived with instructions to work for
the suppression of pheasants, rabbits, and monks. Besides the usual
struggle to disavow the feudal obligations, which the Court lawyers
were constantly trying to fix on the clergy, the other matters
discussed were mainly disciplinary.
Such was Talleyrand’s initiation to the inner life of the Church.
Those who regret that, when he found himself forced even involuntarily
into the ecclesiastical career, he did not endeavour to take a
religious and self-sacrificing view of it, will do well to ponder these
spectacles. Talleyrand’s course was natural. He used the influence of
the president, who had a strong liking for him, to enter the gayer
group of prelates. Dillon and de Brienne opened a few more of the
Parisian salons to him. In the course of the sittings he had been made
“promoteur” (a kind of sub-secretary, usually given a fair gratuity
at the close), and was appointed to an unimportant committee on the
voting counters and a very important one on religion and jurisdiction.
He claims that he won some distinction in this Assembly, and was
already marked for the high position of Agent-General of the Clergy.
In September (1775—or eighteen months after Mme. du Barry has quitted
the scene) we find a notice in the _Gazette_ that he has been appointed
_abbé commendataire_ of the abbey of St. Denis at Rheims, which brought
him an income of 18,000 livres a year. The diplomatic career thus
began. The Pope confirmed the election of the sub-deacon _abbé_, and
the prior took possession in Talleyrand’s name in December. As Chamfort
put it, the ecclesiastical bachelor naturally looked to a wedding with
some rich abbey to pay his debts. Bishops, Pope, and King acquiesced
in the system without a murmur. All the bishops had sinecures of the
sort, and the Court contrived to keep a few vacant at times and pocket
the revenues. Talleyrand had not voluntarily entered the ecclesiastical
world, and he was determined to make it serve his own ideal as far as
possible. But one of his first acts was to pay off the debt his parents
still owed to the Collège d’Harcourt.
Before going to Rheims he had applied for admission into the Society
of the Sorbonne and been accepted (after formal proof of his moral and
intellectual qualities). He took up residence there after the close of
the Assembly. With his abbatial income (more than £700 a year) and the
prospect of scraps of political and administrative work, he could have
at once begun an independent residence in Paris. But that would have
left him in the ambiguous position of a cleric and celibate, cut off
from the higher clerical distinctions and possibilities. He must now
complete his ecclesiastical education in the usual way, and proceed by
way of the Agency-General (to come in 1780) to the episcopate.
However, the Sorbonne had not an intimidating repute for austerity.
The Abbé Morellet, who had lived there with Turgot and de Brienne,
describes in his memoirs the condition of the Sorbonne, and the
details of what we may call its “fellowships,” in the eighteenth
century. Its library supplied him with Locke, Bayle, and Clarke, as
well as with Bellarmine and Aquinas. He read Voltaire, and associated
with Diderot and d’Alembert. Theological studies of the old type were
pretty well out of fashion. His companions were very generally imbued
with the ideas of the philosophers. This relaxation of the older
discipline continued down to the Revolution, and Talleyrand did not
find residence there irksome. He stayed there two years, wrote the
customary theses, and took a licentiate in theology on March 2nd,
1778. He never tried for the doctorate. But we may well believe that,
as he says, he was “taken up with quite other things than theology.”
The success of 1775 had stimulated him, and he spent many an hour in
the darkened chapel before the tomb of Richelieu. He hints, too, that
pleasure was his chief preoccupation, though this is limited by a later
statement that he was unable to look up young Choiseul and find secular
friends until he had left the Sorbonne. About the beginning of 1778
he completed his theological training and plunged in the gaieties of
Parisian life.[8]
So much has been written on the social life of the wealthy and noble
classes in France on the eve of the Revolution, that I need say little
more than that the Abbé de Périgord, as he was now commonly styled,
was found in every brilliant salon and circle at Paris during the
next ten years. “You do not know what it is to live,” he would say
indulgently to the new generation in their restored gaiety after 1815.
In some few respects the pace of life had been moderated since the days
of Louis XIV, but in others it had increased. There were no longer
Pompadours and Du Barrys at Versailles, but the King’s propriety was
less noticeable than his vulgarity[9]—courtiers telling daily of his
prodigious breakfasts and dinners and indigestions, his antics when
they were putting him to bed, and so on—and was quite undone by his
weakness. The cynical memoirs of Lauzun show how little change there
was in the character of the Court. The imprudence and frivolity of the
beautiful young Queen, leaving Versailles to mix with the masked crowd
at the Opera when the King had gone to bed (and being locked out by
her tactless consort at six in the morning), or gambling heavily with
her ladies until day-break, or giving far too substantial ground for
charges of gallantry, encouraged the rising generation of nobles in
their giddy dance in the crater of a rumbling volcano. She was largely
responsible for the passion for heavy gambling that broke out. At
Marly her ladies had to change their dresses after playing—soiled with
the masses of gold wrung from an almost bankrupt country. A vulgar
American adventurer could get the _entrée_ of Versailles by letting
it be known that he had a large sum of money to lose; he won in
a short time 1,500,000 livres from his royal shearers. Another man
won 1,800,000 livres in one evening. The thoughtless Count d’Artois,
the King’s brother, bet the Queen 100,000 livres that he would build
a palace in the Bois in six weeks; he won it—and the 900 men he had
employed scattered over Paris with the story. Whoever could invent or
import a new sensation was sure of the Queen’s support. Racing was
introduced from England, and she flew to Sablons to lay bets on the
horses of her favourite, the too notorious Lauzun. Then chariot races
(some chariots costing ten thousand crowns) varied the programme; and
a society was formed at Paris for the construction of a bull-ring.
Grave parliamentary lawyers and financial ministers frowned, and were
dismissed.
[Illustration: _From an engraving._
TALLEYRAND
(A portrait taken in early life).]
In dress, furniture and banquets the fashion was equally luxurious and
criminal. The age of Henri Quatre took the fancy of the younger nobles,
and they tried to revive the splendid costumes of that time, but the
King interfered. Whole fortunes were spent on fantastic head-dresses.
Ladies drove among the impoverished people and before bankrupt
tradesmen with structures two or three feet high on their heads,
landscapes, symbolic designs—the American Independence hat, the racing
hat, the vaccination hat, and so on. Orders of chivalry were set up
by this nobility that was squeezing the blood out of the veins of the
peasantry. There was an Order of Perseverance, with statutes by Mme. de
Genlis, meetings in a gorgeous tent in Lauzun’s garden, and costumes
of white and grey and silver; in this edifying company the initiate
had to answer a riddle, reply to a “moral question,” make a speech in
eulogy of some virtue, and—vow to redress injustice and succour the
poor and distressed! Clotho and Lachesis must have smiled for once.
There were rival Orders of Patience and Felicity and what not. Then
Anglo-mania crept into their idle brains, and long evenings were spent
in discussing the excellence of popular representation over tea and
bread and butter, and the geometrical gardens were Anglicised at great
expense, and Gobelins tapestry gave place to wall-paper. And, in fine,
we get a real novelty in the shape of Cagliostro with his toad that had
received all the Sacraments, his innocent young girl, and his devils
at command. Cardinal-Prince de Rohan, with the two-and-a-half millions
a year and heavy debts, with the alb worth 100,000 livres, with the
twenty-five _valets de chambre_ and fourteen _maitres d’hotel_, had
set him up in his palace at Paris; and dashing colonels and elderly
countesses and philosophic abbés went to see Beelzebub in the flesh.
And the Fourth Estate was coming rapidly to birth.
Into this giddy stream the Abbé de Périgord gladly plunged. He was
in his twenty-fourth year, still pale of face, but with the familiar
Talleyrand features fully developed: the quiet blue-grey eyes, so
very observant, under bushy eye-brows, the nose pointed and slightly
turned up, the lower lip protruding a little, a faint smile hovering
about the mouth, and a fine crop of long, wavy hair framing the
attractive face. He had taken a small house in the district of
Bellechasse (near the Invalides), collected an excellent library of
good books in good bindings, and at once renewed his acquaintance with
Choiseul, Count Louis de Narbonne, and the Abbé de Périgord. They
were collective owners of a stable of racers, and were the nucleus of
a group of diners and talkers that nearly every ambitious woman must
entertain. Talleyrand soon completed his education. He became a famous
whist-player (his chief amusement through life), and added a good deal
to his income at the tables.
He had in the Rue Saint-Dominique an interesting and useful neighbour
in the Countess de Genlis. After a very romantic career she was then
in charge of the children of the Duc de Chartres. In 1779 she had
retired from the gaiety (and orgies) of the Palais Royal to train,
on the best moral and philosophical principles, the twin daughters
of the Duchess. The Convent of the Sisters of the Holy Sepulchre at
Bellechasse was a favourite spot for “retreats” amongst the wealthy
Parisians, and a house was built in its grounds in which the retired
countess could carry out her work. Over its street door—a grilled,
very religious-looking door—was written, in gold characters, Addison’s
excellent saying: “True happiness is of a retired nature and an enemy
to pomp and noise.” Two of the nuns guarded the door, which was
firmly closed at ten every night, and the key was taken into the
convent. Inside, beyond the simple furniture (she had left her seven
hundred pounds’ worth of mirrors in her salon at the Palais), all
was calmly educative. Busts of great and good men, maps, historical
tablets, &c., abounded. So Mme. de Genlis in her memoirs. She was just
such a neighbour as Talleyrand would appreciate at that time. With
the same ever-flowing pen she would write a most edifying book on
moral education, a Jacobin speech for the Duke, and an erotic novel.
Her moral writings testified, as E. de Goncourt says, to “the ease
with which her imagination could find a substitute for experience.”
All Paris descended on the model teacher’s dwelling in the Rue
Saint-Dominique. There being a royal princess (the infant) in the house
men could enter the enclosure; and, says Talleyrand, in one of his
caustic moments, she “always yielded at once so as to avoid the scandal
of coquetry.” Heavy gambling went on under the Addisonian maxim. One
youth lost 13,000 louis there. Talleyrand was a very frequent visitor,
and an assiduous observer. “When you see much of men,” said his cynical
friend, Chamfort, “your heart must break or bronze.” Talleyrand was not
afflicted with a tender heart. His own house at Bellechasse soon became
the centre of a brilliant circle of talkers. Though he rarely went to
bed before three or four he was up early, and was joined by his friends
over a cup of chocolate. He had a peculiarity in the heart-beat, to
which he attributed his power of dispensing with sleep. He ate
little—a cup of chocolate or a biscuit and glass of Madeira during the
day, and a choice dinner in the evening. But his wine, his coffee, and
his cook were carefully chosen, his toilet elaborately neat. One of the
most cultured groups in the city used to gather at his house in the
morning. Choiseul was the best of the group, and it is gratifying to
find Talleyrand speaking of him in the later days with real affection.
He was an animated talker and a good scholar, but he departed presently
for the Embassy at Constantinople. Few of the others are spared in the
terrible memoirs. He might have said with Chamfort, if he had deigned
to borrow a phrase: “I have friends who love me, friends who don’t
care a pin about me, and friends who detest me.” But their daily talks
were one of the events of Parisian life. Most of them were, or became,
Academicians. There was the boisterous young colonel, Count Louis de
Narbonne, the third of the trinity, a hard military student, but jovial
in company beyond the limit of taste. There was Colonel Lauzun (later
Duc de Biron), who had begun his gallant adventures at seventeen, and
contracted a debt of a million and a half by his thirty-fourth year;
who often shot with the King, and boasted of the affection of the
Queen. Later (when he came out of his third prison) there was young
Mirabeau, “the tribune of the people,” with the huge, pock-marked face,
and the sonorous denunciation of the social order that persecuted
him. Of older men, there were the Abbé Delille, the chief poet of
the time, friend of Voltaire, an _abbé commendataire_ (30,000 livres)
with “the face of an infant,” the pen of a libertine, and the ideas of
a philosopher: Chamfort, of the “electric head” (it bristled so with
ideas), living now with the widow of Helvétius, pouring out vitriolic
doses on humanity in all its aspects, but secretly writing Mirabeau’s
and Talleyrand’s elevated democratic speeches—“How many fools does
it take to make a public?” he used to ask: Count Lauraguais, very
cultured and a generous patron of science and letters: Panchaud, the
Swiss banker, greatly esteemed by Talleyrand, “the only man in France
who could make the goose with the golden eggs lay without cutting its
guts out,” said Mirabeau: Barthez, the doctor-philosopher, editor of
the _Encyclopædia_: Ruehière, the young historian of Russia: Dupont de
Nemours, the famous young economist.
[Illustration: _From an engraving, after a picture by Retsch._
MADAME DE GENLIS.]
Conversation would not lack variety or brilliance amongst such a group.
Talleyrand’s assemblies began to be talked about. He was invited “more
or less everywhere,” and went. He was already sufficiently detached
from the idea of partisanship to find his way about amongst the
conflicting salons. The houses of twenty noble dames were the centre
for as many parties—of the King, of the Queen, of d’Artois, of the Duc
d’Orléans, of Turgot, and Choiseul, and Necker, and de Rohan, and de
Brienne, and so on. Talleyrand overlooked their political differences,
except for a tactical opposition to Necker, and enjoyed their graceful
friendship and influence. He went to the Palais Royal, where the Duc
de Chartres (later d’Orléans, and finally Egalité) was wearing out his
useless life—“his vices,” says Talleyrand, in one of those phrases that
were gaining him respect, or at least neutrality, “his vices knew no
bounds but the limit of his imagination and that of those about him.”
Those about him had not infertile imaginations. Talleyrand was taken
by Archbishops Dillon, de Brienne, and Cicé, to the house of Mme. de
Montesson (secretly married to the Duc d’Orléans), and was granted a
seat in the box reserved for “more or less dissipated clerics” (his own
phrase) in the private opera-house where Madame and the Duke and other
noble amateurs performed. He found her house “at the furthest limit of
decency, but very pleasant.” It is the only place at which he speaks of
meeting his spiritual leaders. Loménie de Brienne had been proposed to
the King for the archbishopric of Paris. “But surely,” said Louis, “the
archbishop of Paris should be a man who believes in God.” It did not
seem to matter at Toulouse. He went also to the Hotel de Rohan, where
the adventurer, Cagliostro, with the olive complexion and brilliant
eyes, was exhibiting the devil to people who did not believe in God. At
Mme. de Montesson’s he one early day made a feeble joke to the Duchess
de Gramont, the sister of Choiseul, and several doors were immediately
opened to him. Once a week he took his own brilliant group to dinner
at the house of Mme. d’Héricourt. The Swedish minister instituted
another day for them, but the dinner was killed by forcing the talkers
to listen to long readings—the craze of the hour. Another house he
visited, at Auteuil, was that of the Countess de Boufflers-Rouvrel; and
at the house of her next-door neighbour, Mme. Helvétius, he would find
Chamfort at home, with the Abbé Sieyès, the later constitution maker,
and Cabanis, the materialist.
The only house which he visited with any particular freedom, besides
that of his mother and that of Mme. de Genlis, was that of the Countess
de Flahaut, at the Louvre. Governor Morris, the American Envoy, affirms
that he found Talleyrand helping to give her a foot-bath there one
morning. Her son, born in 1785, was pretty generally accredited to
Talleyrand, but in an age of myths and scandals exact determination is
as difficult as it is superfluous.
He shared the celebrated dinners of Mme. de Reynière, saw the deistic
Abbé Delille dine with the Queen at Mme. de Polignac’s, and went to
“learned and tiresome concerts” at Mme. Lebrun’s (the artist), M.
d’Albaret’s, and the Count de la Rochechouart’s.
It must not be supposed that he was merely tolerated in these circles.
He was sought and esteemed. It is said that he was generally one of the
last to enter a salon, limping slightly, faultlessly dressed in blue
coat and white vest and chamois breeches (unless it were advisable to
remember the soutane), and there was an appreciable movement towards
him. His biting wit and quick repartee soon forced people to reckon
with him. One never knew when his deep, deliberate voice would break
in with effect. “I don’t know why people don’t like me,” one man was
saying; “I have only done one wrong thing in my life.” “When will it be
over?” asked Talleyrand. “Sieyès is deep,” said another to him. “You
mean hollow,” he at once replied. A lady once asked him, in a period
of difficulty, how his affairs were going. One version has it that she
asked how his legs were. “As you see, madame,” he suavely answered. The
lady squinted. His liberal ideas were, of course, an advantage. “He
dresses like a fop, thinks like a deist, and preaches like an angel,”
said someone; though we have no trace whatever of his ever delivering
sermons. But it was the age of the philosophers. Talleyrand disliked
the more consistent and more advanced of them, such as Condillac,
Hélvetius, d’Holbach, and the Abbé Raynal, because they not only
destroyed superstition, but “broke the links of the moral and social
order”—such as it was. But this was written twenty years afterwards.
He was never caught by the charlatanry of Jean-Jacques. He greatly
esteemed Voltaire, and took care to be presented to him when he came to
Paris and was fêted to death in 1778. The myth-makers of later years
describe how he went on his knees for the aged philosopher’s blessing.
I will only add, to complete Talleyrand’s environment about this time,
that he had relations also with most of the retired statesmen of the
day, Maurepas, Malesherbes, Choiseul and Turgot, and with the chief
scientific workers, La Place, Condorcet, Lagrange, Monge, &c. Of this I
will say more presently. Enough has been said to elucidate the progress
of Talleyrand’s character up to the time of the Revolution. The work
which I have to describe in the next chapter will prevent one from
thinking that his time was wholly spent in pleasure or devoted to the
task of social advancement. From 1780 onwards he was a most assiduous
worker, and must have been an industrious student before that time. But
he tasted, at least, every part of the life of Paris in those ten years
at Bellechasse. I do not mean that he devoured all that it offered.
He was an essentially temperate and refined man. He played for heavy
stakes, as most people did; there were some 4,000 gambling houses at
Paris when the Revolution began, to say nothing of salons, from that
of the Queen at Marly downwards. But this is the only irregularity he
admits; though, of course, the “Memoirs” are not “Confessions.” The
Baron de Vars has compiled a work on _Les femmes de Talleyrand_. There
is only one on the list, Mme. de Flahaut, besides the pretty actress of
Saint-Sulpice and the lady he eventually married, with whom his name is
connected by any show of evidence. At the same time it would be absurd
to claim for him any prohibitive principles in such matters. He took a
mind almost swept of ideals into a world where, one social writer says,
you could count the families that were not stained with incest: where,
at all events, almost every man, from princes and cardinals down to
butchers and abbés, had a mistress. He was no hypocrite. The Church and
the world alike expected too little of him for that.