“Monsieur de Talleyrand, scion of one of the oldest families in France (royal counts, indeed), was the eldest of three children; but he had been lame since childhood, his family considered him unfit to appear in society and had therefore destined him for the Church, even though he was a man who lacked those qualities that might have made him acceptable to the Roman communion.²⁸ Many times I have heard him say that, despised by his parents as a wretch who would never be good for anything, he had adopted a reserved and gloomy manner from childhood: he had never slept under the same roof as his father and mother; they had forced him to renounce his right of primogeniture in favor of his younger brother.” Étienne Dumont, Mirabeau’s biographer, gives a short, blunt description of Talleyrand, immediately exposing a wound. Talleyrand’s infirmity was caused by an accident, one of the chance events of history and fate: at the age of four, entrusted to the care of a country woman, he dislocates a leg falling from a cabinet. For that accident, for that chance occurrence, his lineage spurns him, disowning him. Talleyrand is legitimacy denied. Talleyrand is destined to become a foundling. From then on he will know a double lineage, from the lowest and from the highest rung on the ladder of life. He will be of the oldest stock, condemned by fate; but he will also be the wild plant that grows in solitude. Someone from a most illustrious estate and someone who has never shared the same roof as his father. The age-old root and the uprooted. He who has the power to give protection and he who is constantly compelled to seek it.

The nobility of the Talleyrand-Périgord family is not a nobility of spirit—or drawn by spirit. It is a biological nobility that does not deign to explain or justify itself. The family motto Re que Diou means they will answer only to God—with answers, if there are any, that are invisible and unascertainable. Besides, nobility is “a name and a coat of arms.”²⁹ It is a heredity, so that the individual is just the temporary vehicle. And the individual, as such, deserves no particular attention, except when the “family” is considered as embodying him (“For in the great houses it was the family that people loved, much more than the individuals, and especially the young individuals who are as yet unknown”).³⁰ This is the ultimate form of sacrifice, now empty, reduced to its husk, as perpetuated in the aristocracy, that cannot renounce sacrifice unless it renounces itself. Talleyrand will thus suffer atrociously for the cruelty, indifference, and capriciousness that affect him as an individual, and bind him in his young role as sacrificial victim (the lame firstborn who is to be rejected and abandoned to the Church because he cannot achieve the only single glory, which is military glory), but he will never speak a word against the mechanism of sacrifice. Indeed, after all, his politics are based on a respect for sacrificial heredity: the only truth, however intolerable. But nothing is more intolerable than the sacrifice that continues to operate in the age that rejects it, the age in which Talleyrand happens to be living. The evasive fluidity of his politics goes to mitigate that horror, to cover it for a little longer with the veil of its noble and bloody past.