But no historian has managed to show that Talleyrand actually conducted any important negotiation because of the douceurs he was about to receive. He obtained money, a lot of money, for things he would have done anyway. In this respect he was following the practice of his friend-and-foe Mirabeau. He knew better than anyone else that history had moved from the world of the douceur to that of douceurs. As a result, he felt it appropriate to introduce a change to the well-established diplomatic practice of douceurs: he no longer accepted “snuff boxes or gems, as was customary, but only cash.”⁷²⁵ A snuff box, for him, would have been an insult, as well as superfluous. Money, on the other hand, was the instrument that could be most safely concealed, a device that kept the world at a certain distance and blinded it with gold dust, making it temporarily helpless. The age of the douceur and that of douceurs shared one single rule of crucial importance: Talleyrand spelled it out one day to Vitrolles in order to explain to him why Bourrienne hadn’t been appointed as prefect of police: “What do you expect? Bourrienne wasn’t there.⁷²⁶ He was on his way back from Hamburg in a dilapidated carriage; a wheel broke on the outskirts of Paris, and he lost twenty-four hours having it repaired. That’s what it means to be a poor devil. So Bourrienne, even if he had a revenue of two hundred thousand livres, would still be a poor devil. You see, first and foremost, you mustn’t be a poor devil.” This was his clear and down-to-earth comment on the words of the Gospel “Unto everyone who hath shall be given.”

The douceurs then had to vanish, promptly, on the gaming table, in speculative losses, in the perfection of savoir vivre. Carême was still his cook. Talleyrand had to auction off his beloved library three times. On the last occasion, the sale of his Bibliotheca splendidissima in 3,465 lots brought him 210,000 francs. By then he was sixty-two. On the day of Talleyrand’s death the newspapers were full of solemn and vapid comments. Stendhal read them in Marseilles, with irritation. That same evening he hurried off a piece of his own on the death of Talleyrand, “out of impatience … out of indignation at the high-flown phrases.”⁷²⁷ He was “tired to death,” and whirling in his mind was the picture of the Spanish dancer Dolores Seral, whom he had just been admiring. But the first sentence of this incomplete and private epitaph scotches all mental sloth, and goes straight to the amiably indecorous truth: “M. de Talleyrand was a man of immense spirit who always found himself short of money.”⁷²⁸

While Johann Caspar Schmidt was growing up in the provincial obscurity of Germany—and had yet to become Max Stirner, the author of the only book in the West to express the idea of revolt in its chemically pure state—the old Talleyrand talked at length with Dorothée, prior to sleepless nights in which “one thinks of terribly many things.”⁷²⁹ Once he paused to remember his days at the seminary: “I was so unhappy that I went through the first two years at the seminary without hardly speaking to anyone.⁷³⁰ I lived alone, in silence, withdrew during periods of recreation to a library where I searched out and devoured the most revolutionary books I could find, feeding on the history of revolt, sedition and devastation in all countries. I was angry at society, and couldn’t understand why, due to the fact of being afflicted by a childhood infirmity, I was condemned not to occupy the natural place that belonged to me.”