At that period I often tried to establish a parallel between the two men who, even in that gathering of so many illustrious people, powerfully attracted and captivated everybody’s attention, namely, the Prince de Ligne and M. de Talleyrand. Both, having lived in contact with the celebrities of the eighteenth century, seemed to have been bequeathed to the new generation as models and ornaments; both were representatives, though in different styles, of that witty society--the one of its lighter and more sparkling phase, the other of its easy, graceful, and noble phase; both had the secret of pleasing by the charm of intellect: the first was more brilliant, the second more profound. M. de Talleyrand seemed born, as it were, to captivate his fellow-men by the strength of an ever-direct and luminous reason; the Prince de Ligne fascinated and dazzled them by the sparkle of an inexhaustible imagination: the latter bringing to bear upon the different branches of literature the subtlety, sparkle, and gracefulness of the _habitué_ of Courts; the former dominating over the most important concerns with the easy calm of a grand seigneur and the imperturbable moderation of a superior intellect; the one and the other lavishly scattering around them clever sentences, happy sallies, original and piquant traits, graver and more individual in the case of the statesman, more spontaneous and brilliant in the case of the soldier:--both, in fine, animated with the sympathetic benevolence which is the appanage of the well-born man, and which was more contained with the first and more expansive with the second. ‘Happy ought the man to be who finds himself placed near the Prince de Ligne in the morning, and in the evening near M. de Talleyrand,’ I said to myself. ‘If the one be apt to enlighten his mind by the lessons of a long experience and a succession of true pictures, the other may purify his taste by the never-failing tact, the judicious observation which takes in everything, and the magic charm of a conversation which has the faculty of subjugating listeners even where it fails in convincing them.’ The reception on the evening in question did not last as long as usual, Mme. de Périgord, like the majority of us, being due at the Burg, to attend a monster concert. Nothing, it was said, could convey a better idea of the marvellous results of the practice of music in Vienna. We left the prince engaged in his game of whist, in which he indulged every night with a particular fondness and with superior skill, and made our way to the Imperial Palace.