After a few superior women and so many charming women whom I have met, after those daughters of the earth who said, like Madame Sand, with Sappho, "Come, in our delicious banquets, O mother of Eros, to fill our goblets with the nectar of the roses," what effect did the sight of Madame Sand have on me? Placing myself alternately in the domain of fiction and truth, I find the author of _Valentine_ making two very different impressions upon me. In the domain of fiction: I will not speak of that, for I must have ceased to understand its language. In that of reality: as a man of a serious age, entertaining notions of seemliness, attaching, as a Christian, the highest price to the timid virtues of woman, I could not say how unhappy I was made at the sight of so many fine qualities abandoned to those prodigal and fickle hours which consume and fly. PARIS, 1838. In the spring of this year 1838, I busied myself with the _Congrès de Vérone_[364], which I was obliged to publish by the terms of my literary engagements: I have told you of it in its proper place in these Memoirs. A man has gone[365]: that guard of the aristocracy escorts to the rear the mighty plebeians who have already departed. When M. de Talleyrand first appeared in my political career, I said a few words about him[366]. Now his whole existence has become known to me through his last hour, to use the fine expression of one of the ancients. [Sidenote: Talleyrand.] I have had relations with M. de Talleyrand: as a man of honour, I have been faithful to him, as the reader will have observed, especially in the matter of the disagreement at Mons, when I most gratuitously ruined myself for him[367]. I was too simple; I shared in anything that happened to him of a disagreeable character; I pitied him when Maubreuil slapped his face[368]. There was a time when he ran after me in a coquettish manner; he wrote to me at Ghent, as you have read, that I was a "strong man[369];" when I was staying in the Rue des Capucines, he sent me, with perfect gallantry, a seal of the Foreign Office, a talisman doubtless engraved under his constellation. It is, perhaps, because I did not abuse his generosity that he became my enemy without any provocation on my part, if it was not because of a few successes which I obtained and which were not his handiwork. His tattle ran through society and did not offend, for M. de Talleyrand could not offend any one; but his intemperance of language has released me and, since he permitted himself to judge me, he left me free to make use of the same right in respect to him.