This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelligence as keen as it was witty and narrow, a bradawl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in vice, given up wholly to the search for personal advantage, had about him all that the plain piety of Louis XVI detested, and all that Louis XVI’s slow mind most feared. The king had made him Bishop of Autun against his every judgment, and only at the call of Talleyrand’s fellow-clergymen, who loved their comrade’s amusing sallies against religion and his reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that had led Rome to consider the making of him a cardinal, and only Louis himself had prevented it. For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis who had said in those days just before the Revolution, “I will give no man the see of Paris who denies his God.” Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, destined to compass the ruin of the French church, to ordain to the schismatic body which attempted to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his very vices as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of the levers of Napoleon, to be the man that handed the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. Such was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom on that midnight Louis XVI refused to see. The king refused to see him with the more determination that Talleyrand had asked for a secret audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king’s younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and Artois, who was in bed, asked him to come to the bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and there in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed man lying abed listening to him, Talleyrand, till well after midnight, set forth what should be done. He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a witness. He had twenty times the grip of any of these others (he said) to seize what had happened. He offered, as such men do, a bargain. He had prepared it, as such men will, for immediate acceptance; “all thought out,” as people say to-day of commercial “propositions.” Let him form a ministry. (He had actually brought in his carriage [Illustration: CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND _To face p. 22_ ] with him certain friends who would support him in it!) They would rapidly summon military force, dissolve the assembly at once, erect a new one that would be at the service of the crown. Artois dressed and went to see the king. But his brother gave him short shrift, and bade him tell Talleyrand to go. Then Talleyrand, with that look in his eyes, I think, that was noted so often when, later, he found himself thwarted in any one of his million plots and forced to creep round by some new way, went out to serve the Revolution.