“‘How different the consequences of that single remark, made in the midst of a gay and laughing _coterie_, soon after the accession of Louis Seize, when everything promised security and happiness, prosperity within and peace without, when not a single indication of the distant tempest had as yet appeared; and the old nobleman asked, in jeering pleasantry, of his son, who was speaking of the power of the law—“And pray, young man, will you tell me what _is_ the law?” and was answered by the young man with sudden inspiration, “The law is the expression of the general will!” The axiom has since been repeated to satiety, and has formed the text and basis of the grandest arguments of the revolutionary orators, but few know that it was first pronounced in the manner I have described. I found the whole account of this “conversation” in a letter among my uncle’s papers, in which the writer, who was present when it occurred, gives also the description of the high disputes which the remark created, after the first moment of silence with which it was received—the silence of conviction in the young, the silence of disapproval in the old—had passed away. This maxim, which, dropped thus at random, buried like the acorn, not forgotten, and which brought forth such goodly fruit in its due time and season, is another proof of the tremendous power of our _soi-disant_ “gay and frivolous” CONVERSATION.’” CHAPTER IV. TALLEYRAND’S BOUDOIR—PORTRAITS—MADAME DE BRIONNE—MADAME DE FLAHAUT—A GAMBLING SCENE—THE CHEVALIER DE FENELON—MADAME GRANDT—PRINCESS TALLEYRAND. On the morning after the conversation on the art of conversing, which I have just transcribed, I happened to find myself for some little time alone with C. in the prince’s dressing-room. I had been summoned to the sanctum by M. de Talleyrand himself, who had received letters from England by that day’s post, in answering which my English might, he thought, be turned to account. I had obeyed the message with the greatest pleasure, as C. had already informed me that admission to his boudoir at the hour of his toilet was an honour sought by many, and accorded but to few. In this exclusion he was most rigid, and he reserved the admission as a _distinction_, refusing to yield it as a right even to his most intimate friends. It was perhaps well that he did so, for, by a singular inconsistency, he who has been so often reproached with prudence and caution, was at this moment unguarded and unsuspicious as a child. As I had, according to the etiquette of the place, forestalled by some little time the precise moment fixed by the prince for our rendezvous, I profited by the vacant time to examine attentively the furniture and ornaments of this favourite retreat of the diplomatist, wherein perhaps the peace or discord of European states had been at various times planned and promoted.