On meeting this name for the first time, I ought to speak of the personage who took a remarkable part in the affairs of that time; but I reserve his portrait for the end of my Memoirs. The intrigue which kept M. de Talleyrand in Paris, at the time of the entry of the Allies, was the cause of his successes at the commencement of the Restoration. The Emperor of Russia knew him from having seen him at Tilsit[160]. In the absence of the French authorities, Alexander took up his quarters in the Hôtel de l'Infantado[161], which the owner hastened to offer him. From that time forth, M. de Talleyrand passed for the arbiter of the world; his apartments became the centre of the negociations. Composing the Provisional Government to his own liking, he there placed the partners of his rubber: the Abbé de Montesquiou figured in it only as an advertisement of the Legitimacy. To the Bishop of Autun's sterility were confided the first labours of the Restoration: he infected that Restoration with barrenness, and communicated to it a germ of blight and death. * The first acts of the Provisional Government, placed under the dictatorship of its chairman, were proclamations addressed to the soldiers and to the people: "Soldiers," they said to the former, "France has shattered the yoke under which she and you had been groaning for so many years. See all that you have suffered at the hands of tyranny. Soldiers, the time has come to put an end to the ills of the country. You are her noblest children; you cannot belong to him who has ravaged her, who tried to make your name hated by all the nations, who might perhaps have compromised your glory, were it possible for a man WHO IS NOT EVEN A FRENCHMAN ever to impair the honour of our arms and the generosity of our soldiers[162]." And so, in the eyes of his most servile slaves, he who had won so many victories was no longer "even a Frenchman"! When, in the days of the League, Du Bourg surrendered the Bastille to Henry IV., he refused to doff the black scarf and to take the money which was offered him for the surrender of the stronghold. Urged to recognise the King, he replied that "he was no doubt a very good Prince, but that he had pledged his faith to M. de Mayenne[163]; that, moreover, Brissac[164] was a traitor, and that, to prove it to him, he would fight him between four pikes, in the King's presence, and would eat the heart out of his body." A difference of times and men! [Sidenote: Its first acts.] On the 4th of April, appeared a new address of the Provisional Government to the People of France; it said: