Incapable of writing a single sentence unaided, M. de Talleyrand made men work competently under him: when, by dint of erasions and alterations, his secretary had succeeded in drafting his dispatches to his liking, he copied them out with his own hand. I have heard him read, from the Memoirs which he commenced, a few pleasing details about his youth. As he varied in his tastes, detesting to-morrow what he loved yesterday, if those Memoirs exist in their entirety, which I doubt, and if he has preserved the opposite versions, it is probable that his judgments on the same fact and especially on the same man will contradict each other outrageously. I do not believe in the story that the manuscripts have been deposited in England; the order which, they pretend, has been given to publish them not before forty years hence[378] seems to me a piece of posthumous jugglery. Slothful and without attainments, with a frivolous nature and a dissipated heart, the Prince de Bénévent gloried in that which ought to have humbled his pride, in remaining standing after the fall of empires. The minds of the first order which produce revolutions disappear; the minds of the second order which profit by them survive. Those persons of the morrow and of their wits preside at the march-past of the generations; it is their business to endorse the passports, to confirm the sentence: M. de Talleyrand was of that inferior species; he signed events, he did not make them. To survive governments, to remain when a power goes, to declare one's self permanent, to boast of belonging only to the country, of being the man of things and not the man of individuals: that is the fatuousness of an uneasy egoism, which strives to hide its want of elevation under lofty words. Nowadays we count many of those unruffled characters, many of those citizens of the soil: still, if there is to be any greatness in growing old like the hermit in the ruins of the Coliseum, they must be guarded with a cross; M. de Talleyrand had trodden his underfoot. Our species is divided into two unequal parts: the men of death, loved by death, a chosen band which is born again; the men of life, forgotten by life, a multitude condemned to annihilation which is born no more. The temporary existence of these latter consists of name, credit, place, fortune; their fame, their authority, their power fade away with their person: closed are their drawing-room and their coffin, closed is their destiny. Thus befell M. de Talleyrand; his mummy, before descending into its crypt, was shown for a moment in London[379], as the representative of the corpse-like Royalty that reigns over us. [Sidenote: Talleyrand's depravity.]