Talleyrand: A Biographical Study - Joseph McCabe

Скачать книгу

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

      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.

Скачать книгу