Impartial numskulls say:
"We agree, he was a very immoral man; but what ability!"
Alas, no! That hope must be lost too, so consoling for his enthusiasts, so desirable in the interests of the prince's memory: the hope of making M. de Talleyrand a demon. Beyond certain ordinary negociations, at the bottom of which he had the cleverness to place his personal interest in the first rank, there was nothing to be expected of M. de Talleyrand.
Talleyrand's mediocrity.
M. de Talleyrand kept up a few habits and a few maxims for the use of the sycophants and worthless fellows of his intimate circle. His toilet in public, copied after that of a minister in Vienna, was a triumph of diplomacy. He boasted of never being in a hurry; he boasted that time is our enemy and that we must kill it: by this he reckoned to be occupied for only a few moments.
But, as, in the last result, M. de Talleyrand did not succeed in transforming his idleness into a master-piece, it is probable that he was mistaken in talking of the necessity of getting rid of time: we triumph over time only by creating immortal things; with works that have no future, with frivolous distractions, we do not kill it: we waste it.
M. de Talleyrand entered into office[377] on the recommendation of Madame de Staël, who obtained his appointment from Chénier. He was then very destitute and he began to make his fortune five or six times over again: by the million which he received from Portugal in the hope of a signature of peace with the Directory, a peace which was never signed; by the purchase of Belgian bonds on the Peace of Amiens, of which he, M. de Talleyrand, knew before it was known to the public; by the erection of the short-lived Kingdom of Etruria; by the secularization of the ecclesiastical properties of Germany; by the jobbing of his opinions at the Congress of Vienna. The prince went so far as to try to make over some old papers in our archives to Austria; but this time he was duped by M. de Metternich, who religiously returned him the originals, after having copies taken of them.
Incapable of writing a single sentence unaided, M. de Talleyrand made men work competently under him: when, by dint of erasions and alterations, his secretary had succeeded in drafting his dispatches to his liking, he copied them out with his own hand. I have heard him read, from the Memoirs which he commenced, a few pleasing details about his youth. As he varied in his tastes, detesting to-morrow what he loved yesterday, if those Memoirs exist in their entirety, which I doubt, and if he has preserved the opposite versions, it is probable that his judgments on the same fact and especially on the same man will contradict each other outrageously. I do not believe in the story that the manuscripts have been deposited in England; the order which, they pretend, has been given to publish them not before forty years hence[378] seems to me a piece of posthumous jugglery.
Slothful and without attainments, with a frivolous nature and a dissipated heart, the Prince de Bénévent gloried in that which ought to have humbled his pride, in remaining standing after the fall of empires. The minds of the first order which produce revolutions disappear; the minds of the second order which profit by them survive. Those persons of the morrow and of their wits preside at the march-past of the generations; it is their business to endorse the passports, to confirm the sentence: M. de Talleyrand was of that inferior species; he signed events, he did not make them.
To survive governments, to remain when a power goes, to declare one's self permanent, to boast of belonging only to the country, of being the man of things and not the man of individuals: that is the fatuousness of an uneasy egoism, which strives to hide its want of elevation under lofty words. Nowadays we count many of those unruffled characters, many of those citizens of the soil: still, if there is to be any greatness in growing old like the hermit in the ruins of the Coliseum, they must be guarded with a cross; M. de Talleyrand had trodden his underfoot.