His father, who was a physician, intended from his early childhood that he should be a savant; his mother, an idealist, meant that he should be a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course toward both summits. “At five years of age,” he says, “it would have pleased me to be a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and a creative genius at twenty,” and afterward, up to the last, an apostle and martyr to humanity. “From my earliest infancy I had an intense love of fame, which changed its object at various stages of my life, but which never left me for a moment.” He rambled over Europe or vegetated in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate positions; hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science, and ignored as a philosopher; a third rate political writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected—too great a disproportion between his faculties and ambition.
Talentless, possessing no critical acumen, and of mediocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor, more or less bold and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path clearly marked out for him. Never did man with such diversified culture possess such an incurably perverted intellect. Never did man, after so many abortive speculations and such repeated malpractices, conceive and maintain so high an opinion of himself. Each of these two sources in him augments the other; through his faculty of not seeing things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and genius; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he regards his misdeeds as merits and his crotchets as truths.
Thenceforth, and spontaneously, his malady runs its own course and becomes complex; next to the ambitious delirium comes the mania for persecution. In effect, the evident or demonstrated truths which he supplies should strike the public at once; if they burn slowly or miss fire, it is owing to their being stamped out by enemies or the envious; manifestly, they have conspired against him, and against him plots have never ceased. First came the philosophers’ plot; when his treatise on “Man” reached Paris from Amsterdam, “they felt the blow I struck at their principles and had the book stopped at the custom-house.” Next came the plot of the doctors, who “ruefully estimated my enormous gains. Were it necessary, I could prove that they often met together to consider the best way to destroy my reputation.” Finally, came the plot of the academicians; “the disgraceful persecution I had to undergo from the Academy of Sciences for two years, after being satisfied that my discoveries on light upset all that it had done for a century, and that I was quite indifferent about becoming a member of its body.... Would it be believed that these scientific charlatans succeeded in underrating my discoveries throughout Europe, in exciting every society of savants against me, and in closing against me all the newspapers!” Naturally, the would-be-persecuted man defends himself—that is to say, he attacks. Naturally, as he is the aggressor, he is repulsed and put down, and, after creating imaginary enemies, he creates real ones, especially in politics, where, on principle, he daily preaches insurrection and murder.
Naturally, in fine, he is prosecuted, convicted at the Chatelet Court, tracked by the police, obliged to fly and wander from one hiding-place to another; to live like a bat “in a cellar, underground, in a dark dungeon”; once, says his friend Panis, he passed “six weeks on one of his buttocks,” like a madman in his cell, face to face with his reveries. It is not surprising that, with such a system, the reverie should become more intense, more and more gloomy, and at last settle down into a confirmed nightmare; that, in his distorted brain, objects should appear distorted; that, even in full daylight, men and things should seem awry, as in a magnifying, dislocating mirror; that frequently, on the numbers (of his journal) appearing too blood-thirsty, and his chronic disease too acute, his physician should bleed him to arrest these attacks and prevent their return. When a madman sees everywhere around him—on the floors, on the walls, on the ceiling—toads, scorpions, spiders, swarms of crawling, loathsome vermin, he thinks only of crushing them, and the disease enters on its last stage; after the ambitious delirium, the mania for persecution, and the settled nightmare, comes the homicidal mania. At the outset a few lives would have sufficed: “Five hundred heads ought to have fallen when the Bastile was taken, and all would then have gone on well.” But, through lack of foresight and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread, and the more it spread the larger the amputation should have been. With the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has made his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at the Commune, he estimates approximatively forty thousand as the number of heads that should be laid low. Six weeks later, the social abscess having enormously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now demands two hundred and seventy thousand heads, always on the score of humanity, “to insure public tranquillity,” on condition that the operation be intrusted to him, as the summary, temporary justiciary. Save this last point the rest is granted to him; it is unfortunate that he could not see with his own eyes the complete fulfillment of his programme, the batches condemned by the revolutionary tribunal, the massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the drownings of Nantes. From first to last he was in the right line of the revolution; lucid on account of his blindness, thanks to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his personal malady with the public malady, to the precocity of his complete madness alongside of the incomplete or tardy madness of the rest, he alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, perched aloft, at the first bound, on the sharp pinnacle, which his rivals dared not climb, or only stumbled up.
PRINCE TALLEYRAND.
By ARCHIBALD ALISON.
[Charles Maurice Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, one of the most distinguished of modern French statesmen and diplomatists, born in 1754, died in 1838. Originally a churchman, he became Bishop of Autun in 1788, though notorious for loose and licentious living. During the period of the revolution Talleyrand was in England and America. He returned to France in 1797, and under the Directory was called to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He was of great assistance to Napoleon in accomplishing his coup d’état, and thenceforward was the French ruler’s trusted adviser in all matters of state till 1807, when a coldness grew on Napoleon’s part. Talleyrand’s bitter and pungent criticisms on Napoleon’s policy so enraged the emperor that he finally deprived him of his lucrative offices. In 1812 he foretold the coming downfall of Napoleon, and the accomplishment of the prediction achieved for him the admiration of Europe. While the allies were advancing on Paris in 1814, Talleyrand was in secret communication with them. After the restoration of the Bourbons, Talleyrand took but little part in public affairs till 1830, when, as ambassador to England, he negotiated an important treaty settling the status of the peninsula kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.]
Never was character more opposite to that of the Russian autocrat than that of his great coadjutor in the pacification and settlement of Europe, Prince Talleyrand. This most remarkable man was born at Paris in 1754, so that in 1814 he was already sixty years of age. He was descended of an old family, and had for his maternal aunt the celebrated Princess of Ursius, who played so important a part in the war of the succession at the court of Philippe V.[29] Being destined for the Church, he early entered the seminary of St. Sulpice, and even there was remarkable for the delicate vein of sarcasm, nice discrimination, and keen penetration, for which he afterward became so distinguished in life. At the age of twenty-six he was appointed agent-general for the clergy, and in that capacity his administrative talents were so remarkable that they procured for him the situation of Bishop of Autun, which he held in 1789, when the revolution broke out. So remarkable had his talents become at this period that Mirabeau, in his secret correspondence with Berlin, pointed him out as one of the most eminent men of the age.
He was elected representative of the clergy of his diocese for the Constitute Assembly, and was one of the first of that rank in the Church who voted on the 29th of May for the junction of the ecclesiastical body with the Tiers État. He also took the lead in all the measures, then so popular, which had for their object to spoliate the Church, and apply its possessions to the service of the state; accordingly, he himself proposed the suppression of tithes and the application of the property of the Church to the public treasury. In all these measures he was deaf to the remonstrances of the clergy whom he represented, and already he had severed all the cords which bound him to the Church.
His ruling principle was not any peculiar enmity to religion, but a fixed determination to adhere to the dominant party, whatever it was, whether in Church or state; to watch closely the signs of the times, and throw in his lot with that section of the community which appeared likely to gain the superiority. In February, 1790, he was appointed President of the Assembly, and from that time forward, down to its dissolution, he took a leading part in all its measures. He was not, however, an orator; knowledge of men and prophetic sagacity were his great qualifications. Generally silent in the hall of debate, he soon gained the lead in the council of deliberation or committee of management. He officiated as constitutional bishop to the great scandal of the more orthodox clergy in the great fête on the 14th of July, 1790, in the Champ de Mars; but he had already become fearful of the excesses of the popular party, and was, perhaps, the only person to whom Mirabeau on his deathbed communicated his secret views and designs for the restoration of the French monarchy.
Early in 1792 he set out on a secret mission to London, where he remained till the breaking out of the war in February, 1793, and enjoyed much of the confidence of Mr. Pitt. He naturally enough became an object of jealousy to both parties, being denounced by the Jacobins as an emissary of the court, and by the Royalists as an agent of the Jacobins; and, in consequence, he was accused and condemned in his absence, and only escaped by withdrawing to America, where he remained till 1795 engaged in commercial pursuits. It was not the least proof of his address and sagacity that he thus avoided equally the crimes and the dangers of the Reign of Terror, and returned to Paris at the close of that year with his head on his shoulders, and without deadly hostility to any party in his heart.