[13] The Cambridge History, in saying Talleyrand was “no expert in administration or finance,” forgets his five years’ Agency.
[14] In the Memoirs he gives as the only possible alternative a strict limitation of the franchise and of the conditions of candidates.
[15] The date is not certain, however. Talleyrand speaks of going to Marly, and of seeing M. d’Artois just before he left France. But the Court had left Marly a week before the emigration began. We must suppose there were several visits, and must fix this one, in which he urged strong measures, by the political circumstances. Such measures Footnote: would certainly not be possible in the middle of July, where M. de Bacourt would put the interview; they would have a plausible value up to June 24th. Talleyrand probably did see d’Artois again later. The fact of the interview and the substance of the conversation were afterwards admitted by the Prince.
[16] Talleyrand was appointed to the Committee with the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Lally-Tollendal, Clerment-Tonnerre, Mounier, Sieyès, Chapelier, and Bergasse. Three of these were Anglophile like himself, and the work seemed not only vitally necessary but promising. Carlyle sadly failed to appreciate it.
[17] Maury was not without wit. “Now I will close the abbé in a vicious circle,” said Mirabeau one day during one of their usual contests. “What! Are you going to embrace me?” asked Maury.
[18] The legendary suggestion that Talleyrand poisoned him is absolutely frivolous, yet Sainte-Beuve professes to have a “terrible doubt” in the matter.
[19] It is assumed by some biographers that Talleyrand was privy to the plot. There is no evidence whatever of this, and I think it quite improbable.
[20] The reader may usefully be reminded that the fashion had come in at that time of pasting several-page leaflets on the walls.
[21] She had introduced a female friend to stand for the man she really intended, Talleyrand.
[22] Most of the reports of the embassy to the Foreign Minister (published by Pallain) were obviously written or dictated by Talleyrand. At the end of the report of May 28th Chauvelin is made to say very pointedly that, though he alone signs, “nous” means all three of them. In one dispatch Talleyrand thus describes the English (for whom he had a genuine regard: there is not a sharp or sarcastic word about them in these letters): “A nation slow and methodical by temperament, and which, unceasingly occupied with its commercial interests, does not care to be constantly diverted from it by political controversy.” He is explaining why the French Revolution has little echo in England.