The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen has arrived by the King's invitation to escort the Queen, his sister, during her German tour. Her departure, is fixed, they say, for July 4, but the King is pressing her to go on the 2nd, and he is so strangely anxious to hurry her away, having made all the arrangements himself, that many people think that he will not be in such haste to let her come back. No one doubts that he expects to enjoy himself very much in his renewed bachelorhood, and every one trembles to think of the kind of enjoyment he may fancy. The nature of his pleasures, no less than the type of person he is likely to ask to share them, is a source of anxiety to decent people. There is no doubt that he has singular projects in his head, for the other day at dinner, he shouted out to an old admiral, who had been a great friend of his long ago, to ask "whether he was as great a rascal as ever." The admiral answered that the days of his follies were over; but the King replied, "that for his part he meant to begin again!"
A letter from M. Royer-Collard is always an event for me: in the first place, because I am very fond of him; and, secondly, because he says so much in so few words, in a striking way, and in a tone which is entirely individual, and gives much food for thought. Here is an extract from one which I have just got; it is quite true and yet malicious in a well-bred way: "He [Thiers] is very clever; what he wants is Society and the experience which Society alone can give, a little dignity and a little principle. As I write this it comes into my mind that you will take me for a doctrinaire, which would be very unjust, for principle is a weakness which doctrinaires don't cultivate."
London, June 20, 1834.—Intercepted letters show that the Duke of Leuchtenburg, weary of the tumult caused by the design of the Duchess of Braganza's sister to marry him to Doña Maria, asked the Duchess to do no more in the matter, as too much suspicion had been aroused and success was impossible. At the same time he begged his sister not to forget their young brother Max, who has not been suspected, and who might have a better chance. Now that this new plan is revealed it will probably be as keenly opposed as the ex-Empress's first intrigue. They say she is extraordinarily energetic and ambitious, though to outward view she is all quietness, amiability, and simplicity.
Last night, in our drawing-room, the conversation turned on the character and position of Mirabeau, and I heard M. de Talleyrand repeat a curious story. It appears that at the time of the Restoration he was entrusted during the Provisional Government with the most confidential of the Revolutionary archives, and that he found among them a receipt in due form, given by Mirabeau for a sum of money received from the Court. This receipt was made out in detail, and stated precisely the services which Mirabeau undertook to perform. M. de Talleyrand added that in spite of this financial transaction it would be unjust to say that Mirabeau was "bought," and that in accepting the price of promised services he did not surrender his independent opinion. He wished to serve France as much as to serve the King, and reserved for himself liberty of thought and action as well as liberty of choice of means to bring about the object which he engaged to realise. It follows that, without deserving the extreme imputations of baseness and vileness which some have made against him, Mirabeau's moral character was very far behind his astuteness. He belonged to a bad stock; his father, his mother, his brother and sister were all either insane or criminal. Yet in spite of his execrable reputation, of his being regarded everywhere much as a convict let out of prison, of his hideous ugliness and constant lack of money, what a marvellous influence his very memory has! The book just published by his adopted son brings out very strikingly the power of his prodigious personality and the charm of his superabundant vitality, which imposes itself upon you in spite of the tedious formality with which the author has sought to adorn his subject. The authenticity of the sources, the abundance of quotations from the original, and their extraordinary interest, often make up for the awkwardness and heavy-handedness of the execution.
The book, moreover, has for me the great merit of enlightening my ignorance. I had only the vaguest ideas on the subject of Mirabeau, owing to my very imperfect knowledge of the Revolutionary period, which is too near my own time for me to have studied it historically, and which is yet too far off for me to have known it as a contemporary. All I know is derived from M. de Talleyrand's stories and the Memoirs of Madame Roland. Besides, I have such a horror of this repulsive and terrible epoch that I have never had the courage to think much about it, and have almost always leapt hurriedly across the abyss which separates 1789 from the Empire. M. de Talleyrand's Memoirs might no doubt have helped me, but I have always been too much occupied with his individual fortunes to pay much attention to the general situation. M. de Talleyrand in the Memoirs is much clearer about the causes of the catastrophe than about its details, and he was out of France during the most critical years. His sojourn in America is one of the most agreeable episodes in his career, and for the reader—as indeed it was in reality for himself—it is a period of rest and relief, during which the horrors of the Convention are kept out of sight, and you have time to take breath before coming to the stirring events of the Empire.
M. de Talleyrand went on to say, as regards Mirabeau's receipt, that he regarded it as a family paper which he had no right to keep, and handed it over to Louis XVIII. himself, and knew nothing of what had become of it.
London, June 21, 1834.—M. de Talleyrand was over fifty-three when he began to write the Memoirs, or rather a small volume on the Duc de Choiseul. In 1809, when he was going to take the waters at Bourbon l'Archambault, he asked Madame de Rémus to lend him a book to read on the way. She gave him Lacretelle's Histoire du dixhuitième Siècle, a work both inaccurate and incomplete. M. de Talleyrand, annoyed by the errors and the ignorance of the author, employed his leisure while at the waters in making a rapid sketch of one of the periods which Lacretelle had particularly misrepresented. Those who came to know this fragment were so much pleased with it, and M. de Talleyrand was so much amused by writing it, that he formed the idea of grouping subsequent events round another person whom he had known very well. He then put together his study of the Duc d'Orléans, a piece no less curious than the former, but since almost entirely rehandled and incorporated in his own Memoirs. These, of course, contain reminiscences of an even more personal character, and complete the story of the two epochs, of which one saw the preparation and the other the climax of the crisis in which M. de Talleyrand played a historic part. Most of the Memoirs (and in my opinion the most brilliant part) was written during the four years that he was in disgrace with the Emperor Napoleon. From 1814 to 1816 he added almost nothing to the Memoirs; later, and up to 1830, he devoted himself to revision, correction, and amplification. He inserted the portion about Erfurt, and another on the Spanish catastrophe, which brought Ferdinand VII. to Valençay, in the main body of the narrative, and brought it down to just after the Restoration; but as all the copies of his despatches during the Congress of Vienna (of which the originals are at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) were stolen from him, he was without materials or notes for this interesting period, and this is sometimes obvious in the Memoirs.
It is indeed unfortunate that M. de Talleyrand never kept a journal or took notes. He is abominably careless about his papers, and when he set about collecting his reminiscences he had nothing to depend upon for the details but his memory, which is no doubt very good, but of course is too much overburdened not occasionally to leave regrettable gaps.[18]
I have often heard M. de Talleyrand tell most amusing stories, which are omitted from the Memoirs because by the time he came to write he had forgotten them. I myself was wrong not to write them down as I heard them, and to trust, like him, to my memory, which is so often deceptive for oneself and insufficient for others.
M. de Talleyrand has, unhappily, been too ready to read his Memoirs, or parts of them, to all sorts of people. He has got sometimes one person, sometimes another, to copy the manuscript, and has dictated portions now and then. The result is that their existence has become known, and has awakened political anxiety in some quarters and literary jealousy in others. Treachery and cupidity have speculated on their importance. It is said, and I am disposed to believe it to be true, that several garbled copies exist, envenomed by the slanderous and uncharitable temper of their possessors, and that these are some day to be published. This would be a misfortune, not only because of the evil passions which would be awakened, but also because these unfaithful copies would deprive the authentic Memoirs, when they do appear, of their merit, their freshness, and their interest. They would be spoiled in the forestalling.