one of the foulest political enormities of modern times. His motive for allowing himself to be involved in so perilous an enterprise was, as usual, altogether personal. He dreaded lest a successful conspiracy formed beyond the Rhine might lead (a vain apprehension) to the restoration of the Bourbons; and he would seem to have taken this dark mode of preventing it, for he had offended too deeply to expect forgiveness. But let us proceed to another theme--his marriage. It is well known that Napoleon obtained from the fears of the Pope, Pius VII., a brief of secularization for his Minister for Foreign Affairs, and that Talleyrand subsequently married Madame Grand, or, as she is called in this book, Grandt, a lady who had lived with him as his mistress, and who, in consequence of this transformation, became no less a personage than the Princesse de Benevento of the Imperial Court. Much has been written about this woman, whose history was long a mystery; and of whose ignorance, _etourderies_, and arrogance, every body has heard something. In this volume her introduction to Talleyrand is related in the usual melo-dramatic style of French writers, and her beauty described with that fullness of detail which approaches to voluptuousness. The meeting was accidental, at least on Talleyrand's part. Returning at an early hour of the morning from a gambling visit to the Chevalier Fenelon, the particulars of which are hideous, he found his study occupied by a female, who had waited for _five_ hours alone in the chamber; and who was now fast asleep in an arm-chair by the fire, the upper part of her body enveloped in a fashionable mantle, and the lower part displaying the gilded finery of a ball-dress. The diplomatist was stupefied by the fair vision, which he gazed upon with admiration, and having tried in vain to awaken her by coughing, and other innocent devices, he took up a letter addressed to himself which lay upon the table, and which he found to be from a friend, requesting him to give madame the benefit of his advice in a difficulty in which no one else could assist her. The servant slams the door--the lady awakes--a scene of mutual confusion ensues, which tries to the utmost M. Colmache's powers of description, but which ends in M. de Talleyrand giving to the lovely applicant the document she required, and in the commencement of a _liaison_ which ultimately terminated in matrimony. It was, of course, a trick or practical joke, which had been played off by certain wags, male and female, at Madame Hamelin's assembly on the unsuspecting and guileless Madame Grand, according to M. Colmache; but to any one else it will seem plain enough that it was no more than the step of a daring and clever _intriguante_, who knew perfectly well what she was about, and who had resolved to conquer where Madame Tallien and Madame Beauharnais had failed--and she did conquer.