After this we have a period of four years of political silence. Indeed, only three incidents call for our notice during the next fourteen years. He resigned himself once more to the position of a mere spectator, and was content to throw a light jet of sarcasm on the panorama that passed before him. English visitors to Paris, who eagerly sought to enter the Hotel St. Florentin, describe him sitting in his favourite chair by the open window in the summer, looking across to the Tuileries. The long and luxuriant hair now bore the snow of more than sixty winters, but was curled and perfumed every morning with no less care than when he was the Abbé de Périgord. The bluish shade had passed from his grey eyes, and as age wore on his eyelids drooped more and more, so that he seemed at times to sleep during conversation. But when the moment came the old fire would flash from under his shaggy eye-brows, and his sepulchral voice would give forth a phrase that would reverberate through all the salons of Paris. The freshness and transparency of his younger complexion gave place in time to a death-like greyness. Lady Morgan, who saw him at this period, said his face was like that of a sleeping child. It was a superficial tribute to the art of the two valets who spent hours in preparing it every day. Most visitors who visited him at his hotel, or met him in the picture galleries, leaning heavily on his long stick, dressed in his long blue overcoat, and with his chin sunk in his large muslin cravat, thought they saw the face of a dead or dying man, or a piece of yellow wax-work—until his eye pierced them. [Illustration: _From a mezzotint, after the picture by Scheffer._ TALLEYRAND (Under Louis XVIII.).] His temperate habits had spared his health and energy. In the later years he would rise about eleven, spend two or three hours in leisurely dressing and chatting to privileged visitors, take only one meal a day, and spend the evening—and far into the morning—in whist or billiards or conversation or writing. He had four head cooks, each the best in his department, but most observers agree that he ate sparingly, and at no time of his career sinned against his epicureanism by excessive drinking. A few glasses of choice Madeira sufficed him. He drank, or rather enjoyed, exquisite coffee, and loved to have sweet and subtle odours about him, and to move or sit amongst rare china or books and fine inlaid furniture. He never slept much. He maintained to the end of his days that his constitution took its rest while he was awake. His heart used to stand still, as it were, after every few beats, and he formed the theory that this was as beneficial as sleep.