For Talleyrand, the last negotiating table was his deathbed. He had prepared that deal well in advance, as always; and yet without anyone knowing anything about it. On the death of his wife, now heavily overweight, who had been an alluring adventuress in India, Talleyrand had few words to say: “This much simplifies my position.”⁷³³ It was the signal that marked the beginning of his final moves. Cold and impenetrable, as legend dictated, he planned out his slow game over more than three years. One day he remarked casually to Dorothée: “ ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Abbé Dupanloup … he’s our confessor,’ he added with a half-serious smile.”⁷³⁴ The abbé was invited a few weeks later to Hôtel Saint-Florentin, and heard the Prince recall what the dying Fénelon had said about Saint-Sulpice (“I know nothing more apostolic, nothing more venerable …”).⁷³⁵ Talleyrand, too, had been educated there, in the years of his dark and dreamy adolescence, when he played “the little Bonaparte”: years that he now claimed were the happiest period of his life. With the Church, through Abbé Dupanloup, and Dorothée, who acted here as his minister, the sovereign Talleyrand, in the last four months of his life, negotiated a “formula of reparation.” There were two impending obstacles: first, as bishop, he had voted in favor of the impious civil constitution of the clergy and had ordained several constitutional bishops; and second, having been reduced to the lay communion by a papal brief of Pius VII, he had married, contrary to his unrescinded vow of priestly chastity. Sheets of corrected and recorrected paper passed several times from Hôtel Saint-Florentin to the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur de Quélen, an uncompromising Breton who, for years, had been asking the Prince to carry out such a gesture. One moment that acquires a meaning of its own in regard to that negotiation was the Prince’s last public appearance. “Carried in the arms of two liveried manservants,” wearing a tight black frock coat and billowing cravat that made him look like a Merveilleuse from the time of the Directory, the eighty-four-year-old Talleyrand climbed the steps of the Institut to deliver the funeral oration for a second-rank diplomat, Count Reinhard.⁷³⁶ Once again, he had a clear and definite reason for performing what might have seemed a whimsical act of homage. It would be his “public farewell,” carried out in his inimitable style (“C’est du Voltaire! C’est du meilleur Voltaire!” exclaimed Victor Cousin after the oration, gesticulating with an abstracted scholarly excitement).⁷³⁷ But above all, it would contain a message. With superb clarity, Talleyrand identified the importance in Reinhard’s life of theological study, the same that had guided him in his own youth. Launching into a detailed list of the great diplomatic theologians who had glorified the history of France, the Prince let it be understood that the art of diplomacy, when seen from a certain angle, appeared as a branch of that wisdom held by those who know the affairs of God. “I once heard him say that he regarded himself as one of the leading theologians of his time,” a faithful observer, Baron von Gagern, had written years before.⁷³⁸ A paradoxical claim, which now underlined his arguments. A copy of his oration on Reinhard was delivered the following morning to Monseigneur de Quélen and to Abbé Dupanloup.