However, an actor creates no illusion, if he is utterly unprovided with means of fascinating the pit: therefore the prince's life was a perpetual deception. Knowing what he lacked, he avoided, shunned whosoever was able to know him: his constant study was not to allow his measure to be taken; he withdrew into silence at seasonable times; he concealed himself during the three dumb hours which he devoted to whist. Men wondered that so great a capacity could descend to the amusements of the vulgar: who knows if that capacity was not partitioning empires while sorting the four knaves in his hand? During those moments of juggling, he inwardly worded some effective phrase, inspired by a pamphlet of the morning or a conversation of the evening. If he took you on one side to render you illustrious by his conversation, his chief manner of seduction was to load you with praises, to call you the hope of the future, to prophesy brilliant destinies for you, to give you a bill of exchange as a great man, drawn upon himself and payable at sight; but, if he thought that your faith in him was a little open to suspicion, if he perceived that you did not sufficiently admire a few short sentences with pretensions of depth, but with nothing behind them, he went away, lest he should allow the end of his wit to come to the surface. He would have told a good story, were it not that his jests fell upon an underling or a fool, at whose cost he amused himself without danger, or upon a victim, attached to his person, who formed a butt for his jokes. He was unable to keep up a serious conversation: the third time that he opened his lips, his ideas evaporated. Old engravings of the "Abbé de Périgord" represent a very pretty man; as he grew old, M. de Talleyrand's face had turned into a death's head: his eyes were dull, so that one had a difficulty in reading them, which served his purpose. As he had received a great deal of contempt, he had soaked himself in it and placed it in the two hanging corners of his mouth. A great manner, which came from his birth, a strict observance of the niceties, a cold and disdainful air contributed to keep up the illusion that surrounded the Prince de Bénévent. His manners exercised an empire over second-rate people and the men of the new society, to whom the society of the old days was unknown. Formerly one met persons at every turn whose ways resembled M. de Talleyrand's, and one took no notice of them; but, almost alone in the field in the midst of democratic customs, he appeared a phenomenon: in order to submit to the yoke of his forms, it suited self-love to ascribe to the minister's wit the ascendant exercised by his breeding.