so far as we can discover, he never allowed himself to indulge in unnecessary commentaries or disclosures, and, with all his diligence, M. Colmache was unable to extract out of the wily diplomatist a single idea which it was his desire to conceal. Let there be no mistake, then, about the character of these _Revelations_. They are always amusing, sometimes highly interesting, and at others instructive: but they furnish exceedingly little toward a life of Talleyrand; and what his own countrymen are unable to give, foreigners can not supply. In what follows, therefore, we must be both abrupt and irregular. Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord, eldest son of the Comte de Talleyrand-Perigord, was born at Paris in the year 1754; and died in that city in the year 1838, at the advanced age of eighty-four. His father was by position a member of the ancient _noblesse_, and by profession, a soldier: his mother a woman of fashion, and attached to the court. According to M. Colmache, he came into the world "without spot or blemish," and we are led to infer that his lameness--the cause of so much suffering and injustice to him in after-life--was not congenital, as has been generally believed, but the result of want of care in his childhood; for, as it was not the custom in those days for women of rank to nurse their own offspring, or even to rear them in their own houses, the future diplomatist was removed to a distant part of the country a few days after his birth, and consigned to the care of a hired nurse, Mere Rigaut, in whose cottage, wild, neglected, and forgotten, he dwelt, for twelve years. He was at length recalled from his involuntary exile by the Bailli Talleyrand, his uncle--the youngest brother of his father, a naval officer, and a knight of Malta; who, with the warmth of feeling proper to men of his profession, was enraged, upon his return home, to find the poor boy condemned to banishment and obscurity, and determined to free him from both. He accordingly brought him to Paris, but was sadly mortified to find that his intention of making him a sailor was marred by his infirmity; and leaving him at the hotel Talleyrand in charge of the parties whom his mother had instructed to receive him--for she was not there to perform that maternal duty herself--the honest Bailli set out for Toulon, where he rejoined his ship, and was drowned at sea a few months afterward. Young Talleyrand was now placed at the College of Louis le Grand, and under the immediate direction of the Pere Langlois, Professor of Rhetoric in that institution; a kind and benevolent-minded man, as it would seem, to whom his pupil remained attached throughout his whole life, and who, unchanged and unchangeable, wore, in 1828, the academic costume which had prevailed before the Revolution--a long-skirted, collarless black coat, buttoned to the chin; black knee breeches and silk stockings; large shoes with silver-plated buckles; well powdered hair, with _ailes