In the first place, the kings, the Cabinets, the former Foreign Ministers, the ambassadors who were once that man's dupes and who were always incapable of fathoming him are anxious to prove that they bowed only before a real superiority: they would have taken off their hats to Bonaparte's scullion. Then again, the members of the old French aristocracy who are connected with M. de Talleyrand are proud to number in their ranks a man who had the kindness to assure them of his greatness. Lastly, the Revolutionaries and the immoral generations, while railing against names, have a sneaking fondness for the aristocracy: those singular neophytes eagerly aspire to its baptism and think that they will learn fine manners from it. The prince's double apostasy at the same time charms another side of the young Democrats' self-love: for they conclude from it that their cause is the right one and that a noble and a priest are very contemptible persons.
Be it as it may with these obstacles to a true insight, M. de Talleyrand is not of the height to create a lasting illusion; he has not in him a great enough power of growth to turn lies into an increase of stature. He has been seen too near; he will not live, because his life is not connected with a national idea that survives him, nor with a celebrated action, nor with a peerless talent, nor with a useful discovery, nor with an epoch-making conception. Existence through virtue is forbidden him; dangers did not so much as deign to honour his days: he spent the Reign of Terror away from his country and returned only when the forum had become transformed into an antechamber.
Diplomatic monuments go to prove Talleyrand's relative mediocrity: you cannot quote a fact held in any esteem that belongs to him. Under Bonaparte, no important negociation was his; when he was free to act alone, he allowed occasions to escape him and spoilt what he touched. It is well averred that he was the cause of the death of the Duc d'Enghien; that stain of blood cannot be wiped out: so far from over-drawing the minister when telling the story of the Prince's murder, I spared him a great deal too much.
In his affirmations contrary to the truth, M. de Talleyrand displayed terrible effrontery. I have not spoken, in the Congrès de Vérone, of the speech which he read to the Chamber of Peers with reference to the address on the Spanish War; that speech opened with these solemn words:
"It is sixteen years to-day since I was called upon by him who was then governing the world to give him my opinion as to the struggle to be engaged upon with the Spanish people, when I had the misfortune to displease him by unveiling the future to him, by revealing to him all the dangers which were about to arise in a mass from an act of aggression which was as unjust as it was reckless. My disgrace was the fruit of my sincerity. How strange is the destiny that brings me back, after this long space of time, to repeat with the Legitimate Sovereign the same efforts, the same advice[370]!"
Talleyrand's lies.
There are lapses of memory or lies that are terrifying: you open your ears, you rub your eyes, not knowing whether to believe that you are waking or sleeping. When the retailer of those imperturbable assertions descends the tribune and goes impassively to sit down in his seat, you follow him with your eyes, hung up as you are between a kind of dismay and a sort of admiration: you are not sure that that man has not received from nature an authority so great that he has the power of reconstructing or annihilating truth.
I did not reply; it seemed to me as though the shade of Bonaparte was about to ask leave to speak and to repeat the terrible contradiction which he had once given M. de Talleyrand. Witnesses of that scene were sitting among the peers, among others M. le Comte de Montesquiou[371]; the virtuous Duc de Doudeauville[372] has described it to me: he had it from the lips of the same M. de Montesquiou, his brother-in-law; M. le Comte de Cessac[373], who was present at that scene, tells it to whoever cares to listen to him: he thought that the great elector would be arrested on leaving the Emperor's closet. Napoleon, in his rage, apostrophizing his pallid minister, shouted:
"It suits you well to decry the Spanish War, you who advised me to embark on it, you from whom I have a heap of letters in which you try to prove to me that that war was as essential as it was politic[374]."
Those letters disappeared at the time of the abduction of the archives in the Tuileries, in 1814[375].