“At Louis le Grand he had been surrounded by the bold, ambitious spirits of the rising generation of that day, boys of all classes of society, all animated with the same eager desire for distinction, and, each in his degree, with the same thirst for glory. Even these children were awaking to the conviction that a new light was about to break upon the world, that the triumph of mind over matter was nigh at hand, and that the power of brute force must yield at length to the mightier power of intellect. A discontented spirit had gone forth, and even walked abroad into the very nurseries throughout the land. The days were past when the boys of noble blood sat down to table first and were served by the urchin _roturiers_, their fellow-students. At board, in class, or at play, the sons of the noble and the lowly, of the wealthy and the poor, were now jostled together. The high-born dunce, who was at college merely to while away the useless years between the epoch of actual childhood and that of his admission (still a child) into the army, no longer took precedence of the plebeian boy who was toiling and striving to acquire knowledge, even though it might have been the credit of the former which obtained the admission of the latter into the college. “In this struggle, the talents and quickness of young Talleyrand had shone conspicuously. His position on his first entrance into the college had been most undefined and false. He had arrived from Perigord wild and untutored, ignorant of the simplest social tradition of the _noblesse_; therefore had he no place or influence among the nobles; while, without wealth, or any of the dazzling appurtenances of his rank at command, he could scarcely be expected to have sway with the _roturiers_; and yet, before the first half year had passed away, he was found to be the prime mover and counsel of both factions by the power of his intellect alone. These are facts which still live in the memory of some few of the prince’s old associates, and show how early that grasping mind, which was destined to govern those who governed the world itself, began to assert its dominion and to exercise its powers.