Talleyrand: A Biographical Study. Joseph McCabe

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СКАЧАТЬ “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

       Table of Contents

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

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ