Talleyrand

y injures his foot. That wrench of muscles and tendons, making him limp for life, led to a perverse action on the part of his educators that did equal violence to an excell

of his character-give the refinement, the instinct to rise (Talleyrand, or Tailleran-as Napoleon always pronounced it-is said to be from "tailler les rangs"), the "sensibility" and "spirituality"

yet persuaded France that a mother's duty did not end with an impatient and querulous parturition. Talleyrand's father and mother were both in the service of the Court. It was an age when a king could not go to bed without two or three nobles to hand him his night-dress; and when, on the other hand, nobles could not live without sharing the king

in the suburbs, and so successfully forgotten that when, in his fourth year, it was decided to remove him, he was found to be lamed for life owing to the unskilful treatment of the injury to his foot. Through the death of his elder brother he should have been entitled to the right of primogeniture-the right to the one good position in the army that could be demanded of the King. But the thought of a Colonel Talleyrand limping a

ntative of a family that had ruled the district for eight centuries. He saw the homage of her little court, the group of elderly gentlemen who were no longer needed at brilliant Versailles. He saw a broad country-side, where not a steeple or monument could catch his eye but he was told his ancestors had reared it. On Sundays he saw her courtiers carry her prayer-book in the red velvet bag, and he knelt on his chair near her prie-dieu, and felt the admiring glances of the peasantry. After mas

in the blood-spattered streets of Paris and on the reeking battle-fields of Napoleon. As he grew up he must have wondered at times why, through those eight long years he never felt the kiss of a mother or heard the cheering voice of his distinguished father. Then he would learn of Paris and Versa

dest schools in Paris, the Collège d'Harcourt (now the Lycée St. Louis). It lay just off the present Boulevard Michel, its grounds touching those of the Cordeliers. It was a recognised school for children of good families; in fact, his father left him to pay in later years for his own education. At dinner on the first day he sat next to a future ambassador, a nephew of the great Choiseul. He shared the room and tutor of a cousin. But the

im to the Church! His father lived until 1788 and his mother until 1809, yet he never spent a week under the same roof with them. On Sundays one of the teachers would take him to dine with them, and after a formal hour or two his father would pat his head and tell him to "be good and obey Monsieur l'Abbé." His finer qualities were irreparably neglected. His school-fellows were good comrades, but the eternal dulness of the place and the restraint of his parents depressed him. It was not an uncommon experience in this regard. You find much the same complaint about their school-days in the memoirs of most of his contemporaries. The particular diffic

chbishop-count's brilliant ecclesiastical court, and Talleyrand affirms in his memoirs that he was taken from the college to Rheims. However, it was probably some time later that he spent a year with his uncle, as he talks of being in his fifteenth year. Mme. de Genlis says that she saw him at

n (the patron of Cagliostro-in exile anent the famous necklace), Loménie de Brienne and Dillon. It had not spoken a syllable of protest when they were presented to it for ordination, for the sole purpose of securing the revenues, and neglecting the duties, of its rich abbeys and bishoprics. Loménie de Brienne, in fact, had deliberately chosen the Church as the best path for his ambition, and resigned the secular primogeniture. During the years of preparation for the Church he was designing the plan of his archi-episcopal chateau and dreaming of the political leadership of the country. Most of them, like Talleyrand, were put into the Church so as to relieve the

est of me, but they will have an unpleasant time of it." He himself says that he hardly spoke a word during the first three years at the seminary. His recreation hours were spent in its splendid library, where he sought especially the lives of statesmen "and moralists," works of travel and adventure, and books that described all kinds of violent movements and upheavals in Nature and the social order. He had not the temperament of a revolutionary; his experience and reading led rather to a complete atrophy of his power of devotion to an idea or an institution. In his theology he would read how the service of religion demanded perfect ministers-"victims without blemish," in the wo

of Saint-Germain-aux-Près (a total annual income of 180,000 livres), besides private means, he was not one of the wealthiest prelates, but his see was of great importance, and his splendour would have dazzled a youth with any disposition to the clerical career. But the encouragement of the two prelates and all the glory of their functions were quite lost on young Talleyrand. He says in his memoirs that all this prestige did not seem to him "worth the sacrifice of his sincerity." That is obviously an after-t

lude him. He would rejoin young Choiseul and Madame de Genlis by-and-by. It is a rather curious commentary on his training at this time that a shrewd adventuress, who saw a good deal of him under the Directorate, described him as a mixture of Richelieu's firmness, Mazarin's finesse, de Retz's versatility, and a little of de Rohan's gallantry. He may have heard, too, of that que

prominent representatives were known sceptics, and Hume and Voltaire were read in the seminaries. In through the windows of his prison, too, would come the laughter of Paris, the sound of the bugle, the flash of the passing nobility. A youth devoid of any natural religious disposition, with a horror of ascetic plainness and heavy religious formalism, with a quick, inborn faculty of irony, with a sensuous element just beginning to stir in his blood, and a temperamental craving for woman's society, could never serve the Church. The Church must serve him. He did not discuss his moods with anyone. To most of his

ls. She had been sent on the stage against her wish. This is the only irregularity Talleyrand confesses to at that time, and there is no serious ground for entertaining the wild stories of gambling and liaisons. The soundness of them may be judged from the circumstance that they suppose his father to have died some tim

he priest?" was the question he undertook to answer, and the published discourse was piously dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was his first essay in diplomacy. For priestly ideals he cared not a tittle. But the world seemed to make it a curious condition of success to do this sort of thing, a polite recognition of the particular ante-chamber to public life in which you found yourself. The maxims of R