Talleyrand: A Biographical Study - Joseph McCabe

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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.

      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

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