[8] Michaud tells that he first attended lectures on constitutional law at Strassburg for a few months. Talleyrand does not mention this. [9] “Shall we ever teach him to be polite?” sighed one noble to Maurepas, after a lesson from the King on his irregularities. [10] M. de Lacombe has investigated all the documents at Rheims, and so cleared up the mystery of his ordination—a mystery which had emboldened the myth-makers to say he received the episcopate whilst in minor orders. [11] I do not know whether it is necessary to point out that, though Talleyrand was one of the most tactful and forbearing of men, he was bound to create numbers of enemies. When he passed on from the clergy and nobility to the Revolution, from the Directorate to Napoleon, from Napoleon to the Restoration, and finally from the Bourbons to the Orleanists, he left a shoal of bitter enemies behind him at each step. His personality, his caustic wit, and his curious experiences, formed an excellent nucleus for legends to gather about. You have to pick your way through hundreds of these to reach the real Talleyrand. [12] It is interesting to note that he met Pitt (with Elliot and Wilberforce) at Rheims in 1783. [13] The Cambridge History, in saying Talleyrand was “no expert in administration or finance,” forgets his five years’ Agency. [14] In the Memoirs he gives as the only possible alternative a strict limitation of the franchise and of the conditions of candidates. [15] The date is not certain, however. Talleyrand speaks of going to Marly, and of seeing M. d’Artois just before he left France. But the Court had left Marly a week before the emigration began. We must suppose there were several visits, and must fix this one, in which he urged strong measures, by the political circumstances. Such measures Footnote: would certainly not be possible in the middle of July, where M. de Bacourt would put the interview; they would have a plausible value up to June 24th. Talleyrand probably did see d’Artois again later. The fact of the interview and the substance of the conversation were afterwards admitted by the Prince. [16] Talleyrand was appointed to the Committee with the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Lally-Tollendal, Clerment-Tonnerre, Mounier, Sieyès, Chapelier, and Bergasse. Three of these were Anglophile like himself, and the work seemed not only vitally necessary but promising. Carlyle sadly failed to appreciate it. [17] Maury was not without wit. “Now I will close the abbé in a vicious circle,” said Mirabeau one day during one of their usual contests. “What! Are you going to embrace me?” asked Maury. [18] The legendary suggestion that Talleyrand poisoned him is absolutely frivolous, yet Sainte-Beuve professes to have a “terrible doubt” in the matter. [19] It is assumed by some biographers that Talleyrand was privy to the plot. There is no evidence whatever of this, and I think it quite improbable.