THE TRAINING OF A DIPLOMATIST

The life-story of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-PÉrigord, as I propose to write it, begins when, in his third or fourth year, he falls off a chest of drawers and permanently 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 excellent natural disposition. They say now that the education of a child begins a hundred years before he is born. In the case of Talleyrand you may just as well say a thousand. On his father’s side he came of one of the oldest noble families in France, and his mother was a daughter of the Marquis d’Antigny. But these hereditary influences only shape the general contour 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” (as people spoke then), the self-possession. When you wish to trace the growth of the peculiar traits of Prince Talleyrand, you find the beginning in that fateful fall and dislocation of the foot.

The boy was born in 1754, in the Rue GaranciÈre, at Paris.[1] The week that followed was the only week he ever spent under the same roof with his mother, though she lived for fifty years afterwards, and he never quarrelled with his family. There was no tender rearing, no loving study and direction of the young life in those days. Rousseau had not 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’s purse to the extent of some forty million livres. Estates had been mortgaged and starved; Court life had become ever more luxurious and exacting. The system only held together by a frail structure of privileges, sinecures and commissions, that bound the nobility closer and closer to Versailles and left a yawning gulf between them and the people.

That gulf was not to be seen for thirty years yet, and meantime the life of the idle was swift and strenuous. In such a life the arrival of children was an accident, a complication. They must at once be put away to nurse, then to school, and finally be placed in the system. Lieutenant-General de Talleyrand-PÉrigord was better than most of his class, but a busy, and not a wealthy, man. Charles Maurice was immediately put to nurse 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 along the galleries at Versailles or exhibiting an ill-shaped foot on parade was insufferable. He was destined to the service of the Church. Talleyrand himself pondered at a later date over the long-drawn consequences of his accident. When Royalist agents sought his powerful influence for the restoration of the King, he observed that but for that early mishap he would probably be with them amongst the ÉmigrÉs and royal ambassadors.

At the time it fell out his horizon was bounded by the cabbages and gooseberry bushes of a suburban garden, but in his fourth year he was transferred to a larger sphere. For seventeen days his wondering eyes saw the great world unfold before them, as the coach went from Paris to Bordeaux. A few days later he was in a stately chateau with a very stately princess caring for him. Little by little he would learn the idea of lordship. The Princess de Chalais was his great-grandmother, the representative 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 mass he saw—he has described it all so tenderly in his memoirs—the sick and needy of the estate trail after them to the chateau, where the old lady sat in her velvet chair in the “dispensary,” and the huge pots of ointment (of which the recipes were kept in the family) were opened, and two Sisters of Charity interrogated the applicants, and the Princess cut up the lint and linen with her own hands, and directed her courtiers to deal out the syrups and ointments. He saw the old regime at its best.

The four years that the boy spent at Chalais had a deep influence for good on him. The Princess loved him: she was almost the only one to awaken his finer feelings in those years of formation, and we shall find them, recalling those kindly days, long after the terrible ordeal that was to follow, 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 Versailles, and how the splendour of Chalais was only a distant reflection of the life that streamed out from the capital. At last he was to return to Paris, to see his parents, to ask by what path he was to enter into that life. He was eight years old, a sharp, observant, sensitive and ambitious boy.

Then the trial began, and the de-formation of his better instincts. While his young mind was nervously tracing its large ambition a family-council was disposing of his body and soul, without a glance at anything but his foot. A valet met him at the coach-office at Paris and took him straight to school. Where were his parents? Where was Versailles? The little lips contracted. He found himself in the dull, stuffy atmosphere of one of the oldest 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 teachers were poor (except his teacher of philosophy), and were chiefly expert in the “Almanach de la Cour.” In the course of his four years there Talleyrand picked up a fair acquaintance with the subjects taught at the time—French history and letters, logic (greatly esteemed at Paris, and of very obvious influence on his papers afterwards), rhetoric, Latin, philosophy, and a little mathematics. He was industrious and an assiduous reader.

Long afterwards his experience of the CollÈge d’Harcourt was to lend colour to his denunciation of pre-Revolutionary education. But the poorness of his intellectual training was the smallest sin committed against him in those days. The neglect of his character, his personality, was fatal. An affectionate interest on the part of his parents might have prepared him for the coming disappointment, but it was wholly denied. In his memoirs he speaks with a singular respect of them; at one time he even ventures to suggest that they probably kept away from him lest, in their great love, they should lose the courage to carry out the resolution to commit him 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 difficulty in Talleyrand’s case was the absence of any encouraging words about the future. By this time he had begun to think about it. Gradually, he understood hints that it was not the fine halls of Versailles or the adventures of the camp, but the sombre world of the Church, to which he was destined. In his twelfth year, about the end of his college days, he caught the small-pox, and was hurried off to the house of a strange nurse in the Rue Saint-Jacques. Somehow he survived the deadly treatment usual at that time—great fires and hermetically-sealed windows—and escaped marking. But in his convalescence he pondered again on the absence of his mother.

The time had now come for an open statement about his future. It seems probable that he was sent then, in 1766, to visit his uncle, who had just become coadjutor to the Archbishop of Rheims. It is likely enough that his parents would try to seduce him from military ambition by a sight of the archbishop-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 Rheims in his “eleventh or twelfth” year, but she describes him as wearing a soutane, so that she also probably refers to a later date. Whether or no he then visited Rheims, it is clear that in his twelfth or thirteenth year he was sent to Saint Sulpice, and shrank to find himself in the soutane.

It is hardly necessary to recall that this was a common practice in the eighteenth century in France, and in many other times and places. Bossuet and FÉnÉlon had protested religiously against the custom, but it continued to the full, almost without a single complaint, in Talleyrand’s day. The effect on the Church itself was disastrous. Scores of younger or illegitimate sons of the nobility were forced into it against their inclination, and they adopted within it the Voltairean scepticism and the looseness of morals which the Army or the Court would have sanctioned. Just at the crisis of its fortunes the Church found at its head such men as the Cardinal de Rohan (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 strain on the king’s coffers at its expense. It had been decided, and was afterwards formally decreed, that no commission in the army should be given to any but a noble, and still the supply was excessive; though the King’s personal service cost forty million livres a year, and that of the Queen a further five millions. Then they turned to the Church, with its income of 150,000,000 livres a year, as a field for younger sons. Wealthy bishoprics were appropriated to the nobility, and wealthy abbeys—the income of the Abbot of Saint Germain at Paris was 130,000 a year—were handed over to them as abbÉs commendataires, which might be translated “absentee landlords.”

But I will return presently to the character of the clergy on the eve of the Revolution. Though wealth and prestige and political power were to be had in the clerical profession, the young Talleyrand bitterly resented his situation. By a healthy instinct he felt that, as later experience showed, he was totally unfitted for the Church. Hence he quickly developed a habit of silent and cynical observation, of disregard for authority and conventional ideals, and of unhealthy isolation and self-possession. Many years afterwards an emigrant bishop, who had been a schoolfellow of his at Saint Sulpice, recalled how he used to say to his one or two close friends: “They want to make a priest 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 words of the Church; yet his superiors blandly accepted those who were rejected by army or Court. He saw injustice and hypocrisy on every side, and concluded that loyalty and devotion were masks. So, as time went on, he retreated more and more within himself, made his own interest the measure of his acquiescence, and learned the essential qualities of a diplomatist. In later years he saw advantages in the training. It was well to have been thus “dipped in the waters of the Styx.” He never spoke or wrote a harsh word of his parents,2 or of Saint Sulpice, or of the Church. “Well, God keep his soul, but I like him,” said Pius VII of Talleyrand, after his first struggle with Napoleon.

After two or three years at Saint Sulpice he was sent on a long visit to his uncle at Rheims. Archbishop Talleyrand (he was then Archbishop in partibus) was a conscientious and high-minded prelate, who suffered much in after years from the conduct of his favourite nephew. He tried to reconcile the boy with his profession. The Archbishop of Rheims, the Count de la Roche-Aymon, was a prelate of dignity and intellect, and an imposing figure at archi-episcopal functions. With his episcopal income and the Abbey 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-thought. It was an instinctive consciousness of his unfitness for the celibate state and for religious ministry that moved him. Madame de Genlis saw him at Sillery with his uncle, and noticed the pale, silent boy, with the observant eyes, in soutane and skull cap. He probably noticed Madame de Genlis in return, if he did not hear something about that charming compound of philosophic virtue and plebeian vice. A few such acquaintances and a few small ecclesiastical dignities were all he ever acquired at Rheims.

He says that his uncle put in his way the lives of Richelieu and Ximenes and Hincmar, and the memoirs of Retz, to show that the ecclesiastical life had possibilities. He would hardly need assistance in discovering those helpful books. Now that the Church must be embraced he formed his own view of it. It should serve as a back-door to the pleasant world from which they would exclude 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 questionable ancestor of his in the fourteenth century, the Cardinal HÉlie de PÉrigord, in whose titular Church at Rome an inscription recorded that “he was weak in religion but assiduous in worldly things.” Cardinal HÉlie, a friend of Petrarch, had become an influential politician, had made a large fortune in commerce, and had spent it pleasantly in the patronage of art and luxury.

These ideas would take shape in time, as he resigned himself to the ecclesiastical condition. In the circumstances such a resignation could only take one form. Month by month the restless youth, with the whole adventurous history of the PÉrigords in his veins, would contrast the dullness of his surroundings with the dream of his boyhood. Had there been a profound and general religious sentiment in the place, his earlier vision might have been obliterated; but Voltaireanism was in even the atmosphere of Saint Sulpice. There were good and sincere priests in the French Church then, as ever, but some of its most 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 companions he was morose and taciturn. To his superiors he was a problem. One of his school-fellows used to tell in later years3 how on one occasion he was reading in the refectory, and he came to a passage: “And when the Chateau Tropette.” The superior corrected him, and said “Trompette.” Talleyrand coolly repeated the passage, and was again corrected. He read it a third time, and quickly ran on before the superior could speak, “the Chateau Tropette, which the ignorant have hitherto called the Chateau Trompette.” We can well imagine that a discreet contempt of authority and disdain of zeal were growing in him.

After a time he found the inevitable (and not unusual) means to enliven the dulness of Saint Sulpice. He was leaving the church one rainy morning when he noticed a pretty girl without an umbrella. He offered a share of his, escorted her home, and they saw each other nearly every day for a long time. They were both rebels. 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 time before (alleging that an uncle shuts him in the Bastille), whereas the father lived for seventeen years afterwards. The seminary authorities were not unwilling to purchase a brighter disposition in their pupil at the price. Talleyrand hints, too, that their liberality had some regard for his connections and prospects.

This episode belongs to his eighteenth year. It is the only authentic detail we have about his life after his stay at Rheims in 1769 until 1774. In that year we find him (in the records consulted by M. de Lacombe) competing for what we should call a fellowship at the Sorbonne. The thesis he sustained there on September 22nd was very edifying and successful. “What science is most fitted for the lips of the 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 Richelieu and De Retz had taken root. The conditions of advancement were repugnant to him, but they were not chosen by him. As a young man of culture in a philosophic age, he could not be expected to take religion seriously. He had read much more of Hume and Locke, of Montaigne and Voltaire, than of Suarez. He became a bachelor of theology, and drew near to the end of his dreary residence in the seminary.