In raging against Talleyrand, Chateaubriand thought he had outdone every rival when, commenting on his death, he wrote: “M. de Talleyrand, summoned long ago to the supreme tribunal, was contumacious; death sought him at God’s behest, and finally it has found him.⁷⁴⁵ To analyze in detail a life that was as rotten as that of M. de La Fayette was wholesome, it would be necessary to face up to certain aversions that I cannot overcome. Scourge-ridden men resemble the carcasses of prostitutes: ulcers have corroded them to such an extent that they cannot be used for dissection.” But somebody else would go even further: Sainte-Beuve. And, true to style, certainly not yielding to the dark clang of invective, but containing himself in the venomous whisper of a postscript: “May God protect us from the douceur of corrupt men if they have an important interest at stake.”⁷⁴⁶

Having signed his recantation, “it can be said that Talleyrand died, like the kings of France, in public.”⁷⁴⁷ At precisely eight o’clock, Louis Philippe appeared, accompanied by Madame Adélaide. He wore a snuff-colored coat and polished boots, and was holding his hat nervously in his hand. Displaying a somewhat bourgeois (“tant soit peu bourgeois”) outward bearing, he found himself before the Prince, who was dressed in a faded old dressing gown, his forehead broad and expansive.⁷⁴⁸ Talleyrand broke the embarrassment by presenting those in the room to the king, in the order required by etiquette, ending with his first valet, Hélie. During the following hours, a small crowd gathered in the salon next to the dying man’s bedroom. There were a number of politicians, “some with powdered heads, others with bald heads, assembled around the blazing fire; their animated conversation, though conducted quietly, through the good taste and sensibility of the person who led it, filled the apartment with its incessant murmur.”⁷⁴⁹ Colmache, the Prince’s secretary, noticed Montrond, Talleyrand’s old companion in vice and financial double dealing, seated to one side, sad and alone: “he was sitting in a painful silence, distant from the others, and seemed to be lost in his thoughts, paying no attention to the various details of the scene that was happening around and which, if it were elsewhere, would no doubt have caused him to make one of those bitter and scathing remarks for which he was so feared.”⁷⁵⁰ The pretty Duchesse de V. was stretched out on a sofa by the window, “surrounded by a bevy of young beaux—all robber-like and ‘jeune France’—who were kneeling on the carpet beside her or sitting on the cushions of the divan.”⁷⁵¹ As soon as the murmurs were heard that the Prince had passed away, the rooms became empty: “One would have thought that a flock of crows had taken flight, so great was the precipitation with which each hurried from the hôtel, each in the hope of being first to spread the news in the circle or in the coterie in which he or she happened to be the oracle.”⁷⁵² Only those who were truly faithful were left—those who perhaps grieved most for the Prince: the servants. Each kept the order to which he had been accustomed. All at once, Colmache saw “the cook appear punctually at the hour at which for so many years he had been summoned to receive his orders for the day, but this time he was followed by a group of marmitons in spotless dress and long knives at their belt.⁷⁵³ With solemn footsteps each of them approached the foot of the bed and, kneeling with his white cook’s hat in his hand, murmured a short prayer: each sprinkled the corpse with holy water, after which the whole procession withdrew in the same silence with which they had arrived.”