After the Pope excommunicated his apostate Abbé, that unworthy son of the church wrote to a friend, saying: “Come and comfort me: come and sup with me. Everybody is going to refuse me fire and water; we shall therefore have nothing this evening but iced meats, and drink nothing but wine.”
When the Abbé Dupanloup told him, during his last hour, that the Archbishop of Paris had said he would willingly die for him, the dying statesman said, with his expiring breath: “He might make a better use of his life.”
He proposed that the Duchess de Berri should be threatened for all her strange conspicuous freaks, thus: “Madame, there is no hope for you, you will be tried, condemned, and pardoned!”
Speaking of a well-known lady on one occasion, he said emphatically:—
“She is insufferable.”
Then, as if relenting, he added:
“But that is her only fault.”
Madame de Stael cordially hated him, and in her story of Delphine was supposed to have painted herself in the person of her heroine, and Talleyrand in that of a garrulous old woman. On their first meeting, the wit pleasantly remarked, “They tell me that we are both of us in your novel, in the disguise of women.”
While making a few days’ tour in England, he wrote this note to a gentleman connected with the Treasury:—
“My dear Sir,