Historical Characters: Mackintosh, Talleyrand, Canning, Cobbett, Peel

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

The secret of all that had occurred is to be stated in a few words.

Louis XVIII. had not gained the affections of the French nation; his predecessor had retained the affections of the French army. There was little mystery in the intrigues of the Bonapartes. The Queen Hortense (Comtesse de St. Leu) resided at Paris, and the conversation of her drawing-room was a constant conspiracy, whilst the correspondence she received was the confidence of half the capital. Barras and Fouché both informed M. de Blacas of much that was going on, and offered to give him more detailed information; but that gentleman’s horizon was limited, and what he did not see he did not believe. Moreover, the Royalists conceived that the most Christian king had gained the consciences of the military by naming an aumonier, with the rank of captain, to each regiment, and had the provinces in his hands, because he had placed them in those of functionaries who professed hatred to “the usurper.” “What had they to fear?” Thus, the country which had been fatigued with the soldier and the drum, was teased by the mass and the émigré. And, in the meantime, the veterans of the great army, who saw themselves replaced by a guard of young gentlemen with good names and splendid uniforms; and the beauties of the Empire, who found themselves out of fashion amongst the great ladies of the legitimate court, were at the two ends of the electric wire, which had only to be touched by the little man in the grey great-coat, in order to vibrate through the heart of every soldier who had ever followed the imperial eagle, and still kept the tricolour cockade in his writing-desk or his knapsack.

X.

The conduct of M. de Talleyrand at Vienna had been that which he always followed to any government that employed him—zealous and faithful. He had, in short, been an active and able agent, carrying out the policy which Louis XVIII., with whom he kept up a private correspondence, thought the best for his dynasty and for France; and he had succeeded in giving both dignity and influence to a government which in reality wanted both. He had not during his foreign mission meddled with the internal policy of the court, nor relaxed in his endeavours to serve it on account of the faults it committed: but to his intimate friends he had made no secret of his belief that it was taking a road which would probably lead to ruin. When it had arrived at that goal the case was different. He did not separate himself from it—but he did not link himself indissolubly with it. He showed no hesitation, however, as to declaring against its opponent. Concentrating himself indeed on the one idea of getting rid of Napoleon, he repeated constantly to those who expatiated on the deficiency of the Restoration, “I don’t know what government may be the best for France, but I do know that Napoleon’s is the worst.”

His old master would willingly have softened this animosity; and Fouché, who was intriguing with all parties, with the intention of choosing the most powerful, sent M. de Montrond to Vienna to learn what he could, as to the real intentions of the alliance, and more especially as to the intentions of M. de Talleyrand, whose services M. de Montrond was to endeavour, by any assurances he might judge necessary, to obtain.

This M. de Montrond was a specialty of his epoch: a type of that French roué whom Faublas, and more particularly the “liaisons dangereuses,” had produced. He had ruled the world of fashion by his loves, his duels, and his wit, which was superior to any man’s, for nearly forty years. He was one of M. de Talleyrand’s pets, as M. de Talleyrand was one of his admirations. Each spoke ill of the other, for each said he loved the other for his vices. But no one could speak to M. de Talleyrand with so much intimacy as M. de Montrond, nor obtain from him so clear an answer. For they trusted each other, though M. de Montrond would never have told any one else to trust M. de Talleyrand, nor M. de Talleyrand told any one else to trust M. de Montrond.

This latter gentleman, the soul of Queen Hortense’s circle, and at the same time the friend of the Duc d’Orléans, whom he had known in Sicily, to which island he had exiled himself in one of Napoleon’s fits of ill-humour—not, as it was thought, without an object—first tried to see if any consideration could bring the diplomatist, once known as Prince de Benevent, to his old allegiance: and, on finding this impossible, sounded him, it is said, as to his feelings towards the son of that prince, with whose celebrated society in the Palais Royal his early remembrances must have been familiar. The answer he obtained was “that the door was not then open, but, should it ever be open, there was no necessity for shutting it with vehemence.”

This lukewarm fidelity was not precisely of the temperature that suited the loyalty of Ghent, where some people thought that it would not have been difficult to have induced the allies to have been more positive and explicit in favour of the legitimate monarch, if his representative had been more zealous as to his rights and less sensible as to his errors. The party of the Comte d’Artois, also, instead of repenting of the excess to which it had carried its principles, and recognizing that this excess had been the cause of its overthrow—thought, or at least said, as is usual in such cases, that its failure was caused, not by the policy it had pursued, but by the checks which that policy had encountered.

XI.

M. de Talleyrand, then, was more or less in disgrace with the politicians, who were already disputing about the redistribution of the places that their mistakes had just lost; and, bearing this disgrace with his usual supercilious negligence, declared that his health required the waters of Carlsbad, observing that a diplomatist’s first duty after a congress was to take care of his liver.