six weeks, a circumstance to which, as I have heard M. Talleyrand remark with some asperity, Mr. Pitt never had the grace to allude either during his embassy, or his emigration, or in 1794, when he refused to recall the cruel order by which he was sent away from England under the alien bill. Talleyrand was initiated into public affairs under M. de Calonne, and learnt from that lively minister the happy facility of transacting business without effort and without ceremony in the corner of a drawing-room, or in the recess of a window."
Again—of Talleyrand's bon-mots. The bit at Chateaubriand is one of the happiest we can remember.
"'Il faut avoir aimé Mme. de Staël pour connaitre tout le bonheur d'aimer une bête,' was a saying of his much quoted at Paris at that time, in explanation of his passion for Mme. Grand, who certainly did not win him or any one else by the fascination of her wit or conversation. For thirty or forty years, the bon-mots of M. de Talleyrand were more frequently repeated and more generally admired than those of any living man. The reason was obvious. Few men uttered so many, and yet fewer any equally good. By a happy combination of neatness in language and ease and suavity of manner, with archness and sagacity of thought, his sarcasms assumed a garb at once so courtly and so careless, that they often diverted almost as much as they could mortify even their immediate objects. His humorous reproof to a gentleman vaunting with self-complacency the extreme beauty of his mother, and apparently implying that it might account for advantages in person in her descendants, is well known: 'Cétait donc,' said he, 'Monsieur votre père qui n'était pas si bien.' The following is more recent, but the humor of it hardly less arch or less refined. The celebrity of M. de Chateaubriand, the vainest of mortals, was on the wane. About the same time, it happened to be casually mentioned in conversation that Chateaubriand was affected with deafness, and complained bitterly of that infirmity. 'Je compends,' said Talleyrand; 'dequis qu'on a cessé de parler de lui, il se croit sourd.'"
We find a long portrait gallery of ministers, and princes, and princesses, one more imbecile, ignorant, and corrupt than another. One minister did not know the difference between Russia and Prussia; another always wrote Asiatic for Henseatic, and thought his correction necessary. Much light is thrown on the first quarrel between Ferdinand and his father; and the narrow escape of the Duke of Infantado is well told. Godoy, like all who had the honor of Lord Holland's acquaintance, was in some degree a favorite of his, his good qualities being brought out to neutralize his many bad ones. Jovellanos and Arguelles appear the only honest characters in the midst of such a mass of vice, and even they were pedantic, impracticable, and prejudiced. No history, narrative, or memoir can be so disgusting as those of Spain and its court under the dominion of the House of Bourbon. The imagination of no novelist has ever attained that acmè of duplicity, cruelty, villany, and cowardice, which made up the character of Ferdinand. The general opinion of Prince Metternich, since he has become familiar to London circles, has been rather to diminish former opinion of his superior wisdom. Lord Holland's early opinion of the prince is thus recorded:
"He seems hardly qualified by any superior genius to assume the ascendency in the councils of his own and neighboring nations, which common rumor has for some years attributed to him. He appeared to me, in the short intercourse I had with him, little superior to the common run of continental politicians and courtiers, and clearly inferior to the Emperor of Russia in those qualities which secure an influence in great affairs. Some who admit the degrading but too prevalent opinion that a disregard to truth is useful and necessary in the government of mankind, have on that score maintained the contrary proposition. His manners are reckoned insinuating. In my slight acquaintance with him in London I was not struck with them; they seemed such as might have been expected from a German who had studied French vivacity in the fashionable novels of the day. I saw little of a sagacious and observant statesman, or of a courtier accustomed to very refined and enlightened society."
But the statesman who sustained Austria and procured for it the alliance of France was not Metternich. Napoleon is known to have long wavered as to whether he would build his European system on a close alliance with Prussia or with Austria. Bignon we believe it is that gives the reasons in the imperial mind for and against. Prussia was the preferable ally, being a new country, untrammelled by aristocratic ideas, ambitious, military, and eager for domination. But Napoleon had humiliated Prussia too deeply to be forgiven. And then Napoleon had in those around him politicians who revered Austria for its antiquity and prestige, and who, like Lord Aberdeen, made the Cæsar of Vienna the pivot on which their ideas of policy turned. Talleyrand was one of them. He worshipped Austria, opposed all his master's plans for crushing her, and even dared to thwart those plans by revealing them to Alexander, and prompting him secretly to oppose them. Such treachery fully warrants all the suspicion and harshness with which Napoleon treated Talleyrand. The latter's conduct is fully revealed in this volume by Lord Holland. In fact, the way in which Napoleon found his policy most seriously counteracted, and his projects foiled, was his weakness in employing the men of the ancien regime, the nobles, whom he preferred for their pleasing and good manners, but who invariably betrayed the parvenu master, who employed and courted them. By an instance of this grievously misplaced confidence Napoleon lost his throne. In the last events and negotiations of 1814 Napoleon employed Caulaincourt, who, had he had full power, might have made an arrangement. Talleyrand and his party at the same time employed M. de Vitrolles, and sent him to the Emperor of Austria to learn on what terms he would be induced either to support Napoleon or abandon him. The Emperor of Austria was naturally most unwilling to proceed to the latter extreme. But M. Vitrolles, a secret agent of the Bourbons, so falsified and misrepresented everything to the Emperor that the sacrifice of Napoleon was assented to.
Our last extract relates some traits of the great Napoleon which seem more than ordinarily worth his nephew's attention just now. They are taken from a somewhat elaborate character of the Emperor which occupies nearly a third of the volume.
"Nothing could exceed the order and regularity with which his household both as Consul and Emperor was conducted. The great things he accomplished, and the savings he made, without even the imputation of avarice or meanness, with the sum comparatively inconsiderable of fifteen millions of francs a year, are marvellous, and expose his successors, and indeed all European Princes, to the reproach of negligence or incapacity. In this branch of his government he owed much to Duroc. It is said that they often visited the markets of Paris (les halles) dressed in plain clothes and early in the morning. When any great accounts were to be submitted to the Emperor, Duroc would apprize him in secret of some of the minutest details. By an adroit allusion to them or a careless remark on the points upon which he had received such recent and accurate information, Napoleon contrived to impress his audience with a notion that the master's eye was every where. For instance, when the Tuileries were furnished, the upholsterer's charges though not very exorbitant, were suspected by the Emperor to be higher than the usual profit of that trade would have warranted. He suddenly asked some minister who was with him how much the egg at the end of the bell-rope should cost? 'J'ignore,' was the answer.—'Eh bien! nous verrons,' said he, and then cut off the ivory handle, called for a valet, and bidding him dress himself in plain and ordinary clothes, and neither divulge his immediate commission or general employment to any living soul, directed him to inquire the price of such articles at several shops in Paris, and to order a dozen as for himself. They were one-third less dear than those furnished to the palace. The Emperor, inferring that the same advantage had been taken in the other articles, struck a third off the whole charge, and directed the tradesman to be informed that it was done at his express command, because on inspection he had himself discovered the charges to be by one-third too exorbitant. When afterwards in the height of his glory he visited Caen with the Empress Maria Louisa, and a train of crowned heads and princes, his old friend, M. Mechin, the Prefect, aware of his taste for detail, waited upon him with five statistical tables of the expenditure, revenue, prices, produce, and commerce of the departments. 'C'est bon,' said he, when he received them the evening of his arrival, 'vous et moi nous ferous bien de l'esprit sur tout cela demain au Conseil.' Accordingly, he astonished all the leading proprietors of the department at the meeting next day, by his minute knowledge of the prices of good and bad cyder, and of the produce and other circumstances of the various districts of the department. Even the Royalist gentry were impressed with a respect for his person, which
