“Indeed, there is a great similarity between Goethe and Talleyrand, these two princely souls!¹³ Goethe is a literary Talleyrand, dressed up in his cravat like Talleyrand. Except that, even though he wore the famous cravat that had to be knotted eighteen times, Goethe did not have the impertinence with which Talleyrand held his head, with the semi-closed eye of a charmer, the eye of the languishing viper, since these are spontaneous and natural things that Talleyrand had—gifts of God or of the devil!—whereas nothing is spontaneous and natural in Goethe, this operatic actor, always in front of a mirror …”

How did the Revolution find Talleyrand? “He loved the worldly life of the old days, as a man of his situation and quality could live it: he had a passion for women, gambling and everything that made a man fashionable at that time, and it was thus that 1789 found Monsieur de Talleyrand.”¹⁴ It also found him with an abnormal gift for discerning how times were moving. And in it lay his entire political intelligence. “The benefits he enjoyed would have been taken from him by the force of events; and, in his opinion, it was better to abandon them beforehand (I always say ‘perhaps’).” In the irony of her “perhaps,” the Duchesse d’Abrantès refers to one of the rare characteristics that can certainly be attributed to Talleyrand.¹⁵ To sniff out the times, a beast in the boudoir. The aristocratic choice of giving what a moment later would be snatched away (“only one course remained: to yield before being forced into doing so, and while credit could still be gained for it”).¹⁶ A Talleyrand cannot accept that something is to be snatched from him: but he’ll accept that he can give everything away. Especially if what he is giving is a Gift-gift, a poisoned gift, something that he privately hates: ecclesiastical privileges, for example, which were the mark of an occupation (the occupation of bishop) into which he had been forced by his parents’ innate tyranny. By giving those revenues and privileges to the nation he was reaping revenge on the demonic aspect of the nobility—its unassailable whim—to which he had been compelled to submit from birth.

Behind the welter of facts, behind the conspiracies and betrayals, we also find the stubborn loyalty of Talleyrand. Certain perceptions of him seem to have been permanently fixed, and nothing of what later happened would undermine them. First, the early awareness that the age of bouleversements and upheavals, in short the “age of revolutions,” had begun; that every movement from then on would be a ripple in the current—and that this demanded an adequate and lasting change in all methods of action.¹⁷ Certain symbols of power would be ludicrously impotent from then on; whereas certain other gestures (such as the ball that Talleyrand gave for Madame Bonaparte at Hôtel Galliffet on January 3, 1798) were more decisive than battles. Second: that the summum bonum, the supersensible sun of political action, would no longer be to hinder or exacerbate that turmoil (brute childishness in both cases), but to soften the blow, coating the rough edges with lenitive, residual douceurs, wrapping them in noble gauzes abandoned in the attics. And above all removing faith from the turmoil, not attributing that plus that it always claims to represent: in short, not to believe that slaughter could be easily transformed into sacrifice. Without a liturgy, people were moving about in a vast slaughterhouse.