He resisted, therefore, the kindly pressure of the King and retired to Valençay. “There is,” he wrote to a correspondent, “an interval between life and death that should be employed in dying decently.” There still remained three or four years of life. It is said that he offered to go as ambassador to Vienna in 1835, but Louis-Philippe was apprehensive of advances being made to him by the Bourbons. In that year were published, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, George Sand’s outrageous _Lettres d’un voyageur_. Imagining her traveller to stand by moonlight before the chateau of Valençay, she puts into his mouth some of the most repulsive calumnies against Talleyrand, as the silhouetted forms appear at the windows. The subject of her ridiculous nightmares was then an old man in his eighty-first year, peacefully concluding his memoirs and passing the last slow days in the company of the Duchess of Dino and her young daughter, Pauline. Maubreuil was hardly less chivalrous. George Sand was a not distant neighbour, and her description of his “daily round” may be less imaginative. He rose at eleven, and spent three or four hours (?) in the hands of his valets. At three he had a drive round the park with his doctor, and at five enjoyed “the most succulent and artistic dinner in France.” After a few words to his family, he would drive in the park again until eleven, and then work in his own room until five o’clock. Visitors still made their pilgrimages to Valençay. We find Sir Robert and Lady Peel there in 1836. His mind is described as retaining its vigour and perspicacity, but by the end of 1835 loss of power in the legs began to foreshadow the end. His temperate habits had their reward in good general health. It is said that after death his organs—apart from the local trouble—were found to be singularly sound for an octogenarian. [Illustration: _From a lithograph by Jeffrey, after a bust by Dantan._ TALLEYRAND (Portrait-caricature, in later life).]