Excellence in a profession, and success in business, can be attained only by persevering industry. None who thinks himself above his vocation can succeed in it, for we can not give our attention to what our self-importance despises. None can be eminent in his vocation who devotes his mental energy to a pursuit foreign to it, for, in such a case, success in what we love is failure in what we neglect.
Among men, you must either speak what is agreeable to their humor, or what is consistent with truth and good morals. Make it a general rule of conduct neither to flatter virtue nor exasperate folly: by flattering virtue, you can not confirm it; by exasperating folly, you can not reform it. Submit, however, to no compromise with truth, but, when it allows, accommodate yourself with honest courtesy to the prepossessions of others.
In your whole behavior to mankind, conduct yourself with fairness and integrity. If an action is well received, you will have the credit it deserves; if it is not well received, you will have the approval of your own mind. The approval of a good conscience is preferable to the applause of the world.
Form no resolution, and engage in no undertaking, which you can not invoke Heaven to sanction. A good man prays the Almighty to be propitious to his virtuous plans: if his petition is denied, he knows it is denied in mercy, and he is resigned; if it is granted, he is grateful, and enjoys the blessings with moderation. A wicked man, in his iniquitous plans, either fails or succeeds: if he fails, disappointment is embittered by self-reproach; if he succeeds, success is without pleasure, for, when he looks around, he sees no smile of congratulation.
[From Fraser's Magazine.]
TALLEYRAND.[17]
"Celebrated people," said Napoleon, when speaking of Necker, "lose on a close view:" a remark not substantially different from that of the Duke of Marlborough, that "no man was a hero to his valet de chambre." Proximity, like familiarity, "breeds contempt;" and the proper cure for the illusions of distance is nearness. Few objects in nature, whether living or dead, can stand the application of that test, which is as fatal to the pretensions of men as of mountains: while it is notorious that the judgments of history are seldom in accordance with the decisions of contemporaries or friends. Human greatness resembles physical magnitude in this, that its proportions are more or less affected by surrounding influences, which must be removed before its real dimensions can be ascertained. It is, in fact, one of the fluctuating quantities of social arithmetic, and to fix its precise amount is now, and ever has been, one of the most difficult enterprises in which a public writer can engage. It is apt, also, to be confounded with mere celebrity. Obscurity is not one of its accidents, but fame is; and there is something like an irresistible tendency on the part of mankind at large, to believe in the claims to distinction of the man who has been vulgatus per orbem. Humility does very well for poets—your Horaces and Grays, for instance—who can find Agamemnons and Hampdens on every village green, to whom the opportunity only of acquiring renown has been denied by envious fate; but the prose of life discards it as an unsuitable and troublesome adjunct, and refuses to extend its reverence to what is not appreciable. A famous man is, therefore, always presumed to be a great man, and he may be so in so far as popular reputation is concerned, though he need not be so otherwise. To which of these classes did Talleyrand belong? That he was celebrated is beyond doubt. Was he great? That is a different question, and could be answered satisfactorily only by a much more elaborate inquiry into his history than it is possible for us to institute. Forty years must elapse from his death, which took place in 1838, before those memoirs, which he is known to have compiled, shall be given to the world; and whoever tries will find it to be no easy task to anticipate those revelations which are reserved for the eyes and ears of the generation of 1878. Let us, then, be contented with a humbler effort, and endeavor to make the most of the materials which are accessible to us, scanty though they be. There are spurious lives of Talleyrand by the dozen. He repudiated these scandalous and gossiping chronicles in his life-time, and it is no part of our business to resuscitate them. M. Colmache's volume is of another stamp, however, and bears unexceptionable internal evidence of the honesty of the writer, whether we agree in his conclusions or not. As secretary to the prince he had superior facilities for acquiring a knowledge of, at least, the domestic habits of the man, but beyond this he has accomplished little; for though his work be well, and even powerfully written, and though it contain numerous fragments of strong dramatic interest which illustrate in a very remarkable manner Talleyrand's moral idiosyncracy, as well as the usages of the age and country in which he lived—it would be absurd to suppose that the most reserved man in Europe, who had drilled his passions into a state of repose, and disciplined his tongue into the obedient slave of his own secret purposes, had given his confidence to a servant, in the full knowledge that every word which he uttered, and every opinion which he expressed, would be noted down, and published to the world when the grave had closed upon his remains. A less astute person, occupying the same conspicuous position in life, would have been guilty of no such folly as this: and though M. Colmache may have thought otherwise, he was obviously trusted with no more than it was perfectly safe for his master's posthumous reputation that he should be allowed to know. Moreover, we must remember, that though the French pride themselves on their skill in conversation—l'art de causer, as they term it—it is a wholly different thing from what would pass by that name in Britain. Men do not meet together in France (or, rather, they did not, for it is impossible to tell what they do now, and it would be unprofitable to inquire), freely to exchange their thoughts upon questions of importance, to discuss philosophy, religion, literature, or even politics; but to chat, to trifle with time, and to dispel weariness. Every thing that is serious is interdicted as an offense against good taste; and a French talker would rather run the risk of being considered a fool than a bore. The tyranny of fashion has been always cheerfully submitted to on this point; and to be brilliant, startling, and epigrammatic, are the passports to conversational reputation: not to be weighty, solid, or wise. To judge by M. Colmache's book, Talleyrand did not converse. It was no part of his social economy to intercommune with any one. His thoughts were his own, and he kept them to himself: hence, after we have perused this book, abounding as it does in curious sketches and narratives, we know nothing more of Talleyrand's sentiments on men and things than we did before. There was, no doubt, the usual lingual intercourse among his guests at the Château Vallençay, but the great man took no part in it. His rôle was lofty, mysterious, and grand. When he spoke all were silent, all attentive, all obsequious: but there was no conversation, in our sense of the word, and no dialogue, for there were no interlocutors. It was a monologue, in fact, and an interesting one—for his memory was deeply impressed with the recollections of the past, and he delighted to call them up, and to astonish his auditors by the freshness and vigor of his coloring: but, so far as we can discover, he never allowed himself to indulge in unnecessary commentaries or disclosures, and, with all his diligence, M. Colmache was unable to extract out of the wily diplomatist a single idea which it was his desire to conceal. Let there be no mistake, then, about the character of these Revelations. They are always amusing, sometimes highly interesting, and at others instructive: but they furnish exceedingly little toward a life of Talleyrand; and what his own countrymen are unable to give, foreigners can not supply. In what follows, therefore, we must be both abrupt and irregular.
Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord, eldest son of the Comte de Talleyrand-Périgord, was born at Paris in the year 1754; and died in that city in the year 1838, at the advanced age of eighty-four. His father was by position a member of the ancient noblesse, and by profession, a soldier: his mother a woman of fashion, and attached to the court. According to M. Colmache, he came into the world "without spot or blemish," and we are led to infer that his lameness—the cause of so much suffering and injustice to him in after-life—was not congenital, as has been generally believed, but the result of want of care in his childhood; for, as it was not the custom in those days for women of rank to nurse their own offspring, or even to rear them in their own houses, the future diplomatist was removed to a distant part of the country a few days after his birth, and consigned to the care of a hired nurse, Mère Rigaut, in whose cottage, wild, neglected, and forgotten, he dwelt, for twelve years. He was at length recalled from his involuntary exile by the Bailli Talleyrand, his uncle—the youngest brother of his father, a naval officer, and a knight of Malta; who, with the warmth of feeling proper to men of his profession, was enraged, upon his return home, to find the poor boy condemned to banishment and obscurity, and determined to free him from both. He accordingly brought him to Paris, but was sadly mortified to find that his intention of making him a sailor was marred by his infirmity; and leaving him at the hôtel Talleyrand in charge of the parties whom his mother had instructed to receive him—for she was not there to perform that maternal duty herself—the honest Bailli set out for Toulon, where he rejoined his ship, and was drowned at sea a few months afterward. Young Talleyrand was now placed at the College of Louis le Grand, and under the immediate direction of the Père Langlois, Professor of Rhetoric in that institution; a kind and benevolent-minded man, as it would seem, to whom his pupil remained attached throughout his whole life, and who, unchanged and unchangeable, wore, in 1828, the academic costume which had prevailed before the Revolution—a long-skirted, collarless black coat, buttoned to the chin; black knee breeches and silk stockings; large shoes with silver-plated buckles; well powdered hair, with ailes de pigeon and a queue of portentous dimensions; and that indispensable companion of a savant crasseux of the middle of the eighteenth century, a huge flat snuff-box, which lay concealed in the deep recesses in his ample pockets. Talleyrand remained at this school for three years, and would appear to have made a respectable figure as a student, considering the disadvantages under which he labored from the want of preliminary training. It is probable that a sense of this deficiency on the part of a lively lad, joined to the stimulus of competition, quickened his diligence, and he was rewarded with praise and prizes. He was also addicted to active sports, for "he was strong and hardy in spite of his lameness;" and we are told that his temper was mild and tractable at this period, and that, when attacked, his defensive weapon was his tongue, not his hands—so true is it, that "the boy is father to the man." His sharp, quick speech, we are assured, was the terror of his comrades—i.e. when a bolder youth would have boxed his antagonist's ears, Talleyrand scolded, and doubtlessly provoked him; but as there must be a philosophical reason for whatever concerns the nonage of a celebrated person, it is added, that "even then (between twelve and fifteen, observe) he had learned that the art of governing others consisted merely in self-command." During his residence at college he saw nothing of his father, and little of his mother; and when the latter did visit him, she was always attended by an eminent surgeon, whose duty it was to torture the unfortunate boy's leg, and to try, by bandages, cauteries, and other appliances, to make that long and straight which neglect had made short and crooked. These visits of madame mère were anticipated with horror, and ever afterward spoken of with disgust; nor could they have increased that love for the author of his being which is so natural to youth, and which an incident that occurred about this time would seem to have utterly extinguished.
At the close of his third year at college, his father died from the effects of an old wound received in battle. This event must have happened when his son had attained to the fifteenth year of his age, and, consequently, in the year 1769. By the laws of nature and of feudal succession, that son was now the head of his house, a peer of France, the inheritor of those peculiar privileges which then belonged to his order, the owner of large territorial possessions, and the Comte Talleyrand-Périgord: of all which rights, immunities, titles, and dignities, he was arbitrarily deprived by the cruel decision of a family council, of which his mother was the author and promoter, and his birthrights handed over to his younger brother, who, in his infancy, had been companion of his exile. Why this act of iniquity was committed, and how, we shall allow M. Colmache to tell: