Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/416

had so much to recommend it as at Paris in his youth. In the Memoirs he speaks of a diminution of refinement and a falling-off from what had been before the approach of revolution. He regards himself as belonging to a higher and earlier epoch of good manners, and describes as bearing an inferior stamp men who were the guide of contemporaries and their mould of form. Choiseul, the man he liked best, gesticulates too much, and has a cold heart. Narbonne's cleverness is all for show, and is exhausted by a joke ; his spirits are higher than good taste allows, his familiar grace makes him friends, especially among rather vulgar men. Il a une politesse sans nuances. Nevertheless, they were all such good friends that their intimacy, in the course of five years, was never disturbed by tittle-tattle or misunderstanding. He attributes his own reputation for wit a good deal to the power of holding his tongue. He explains what he considers that the best conversation should be, by the example of his mother, whose charm consisted in pleasing and passing on, without saying a word that could strike or remain. Elle ne parlait que par nuances ; jamais elle n'a dit un bon mot : c’était quelque chose de trop exprimé. Much of the thought, the talent, the discipline, the exertion which goes, with other men, to the conduct of affairs, the making of speeches, the writing of books, was concentrated, by him, on the business of pleasant intercourse. His perfect mastery of so much that makes mere society enjoyable, acquired among men who had beheld the evening rays of Louis the Fourteenth, became one of the elements of his superiority ; and he spoke with meaning when, after an outbreak of Napoleon's fury, he said that it was a pity so great a man had been so ill brought up. An ambassador described him in 1814 as one "qui posséda si éminemment l’art de la société, et qui en a si souvent usé avec succès, tantôt pour en imposer a ceux, qu'on voulait détruire, en leur faisant perdre contenance, tantôt pour attirer a lui ceux dont on voulait se servir." The prestige of his grand manner, of his lofty distinction was a weapon both for attack and defence. The Emperor