XIII
TALLEYRAND'S MEMOIRS[1]
The reality of History is so unlike the report that we continue, in spite of much disappointment, to look for revelations as often as an important personage leaves us his reminiscences. The famous book which has been so eagerly expected and so long withheld will not satisfy those who, like the first Queen of Prussia, demand to know le pourquoy du pourquoy. The most experienced and sagacious of men discourses about certain selected events that concerned him, and passes sentence on two generations of contemporaries ; but he betrays few secrets and prepares no surprises. Nothing could increase the lustre of the talents which he is known — by the malevolent testimony of Vitrolles — to have displayed at the first restoration, or which are proved by his own correspondence from Vienna. But we are made to know him better ; and all that he says and much that he conceals brings into vivid light one of the wonders of modern politics.
Three months after the fall of Napoleon, Talleyrand went out of office, opposed by Russia, disliked by the King, hated by the triumphant Royalists. Under that constellation, mainly in the year 1816, he wrote these Memoirs. The undercurrent of motive is to explain, or to explain away, the earlier part of his career ; to expose his incomparable services to the crown, the country, and the dominant party ; to show that nothing in the various past disqualifies him for the first place in the councils of the monarchy he had restored. It is not the plea of a
- ↑ The Nineteenth Century, April 1891.
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