The life-story of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, as I propose to write it, begins when, in his third or fourth year, he falls off a chest of drawers and permanently injures his foot. That wrench of muscles and tendons, making him limp for life, led to a perverse action on the part of his educators that did equal violence to an excellent natural disposition. They say now that the education of a child begins a hundred years before he is born. In the case of Talleyrand you may just as well say a thousand. On his father’s side he came of one of the oldest noble families in France, and his mother was a daughter of the Marquis d’Antigny. But these hereditary influences only shape the general contour of his character—give the refinement, the instinct to rise (Talleyrand, or Tailleran—as Napoleon always pronounced it—is said to be from “tailler les rangs”), the “sensibility” and “spirituality” (as people spoke then), the self-possession. When you wish to trace the growth of the peculiar traits of Prince Talleyrand, you find the beginning in that fateful fall and dislocation of the foot. The boy was born in 1754, in the Rue Garancière, at Paris.[1] The week that followed was the only week he ever spent under the same roof with his mother, though she lived for fifty years afterwards, and he never quarrelled with his family. There was no tender rearing, no loving study and direction of the young life in those days. Rousseau had not yet persuaded France that a mother’s duty did not end with an impatient and querulous parturition. Talleyrand’s father and mother were both in the service of the Court. It was an age when a king could not go to bed without two or three nobles to hand him his night-dress; and when, on the other hand, nobles could not live without sharing the king’s purse to the extent of some forty million livres. Estates had been mortgaged and starved; Court life had become ever more luxurious and exacting. The system only held together by a frail structure of privileges, sinecures and commissions, that bound the nobility closer and closer to Versailles and left a yawning gulf between them and the people.