A visitor at the Salon of 1828 happened to come across Talleyrand: “Approaching, or rather dragging himself along between two valets who were dressed in black, we saw a kind of motionless figure who slid with the same step in front of daubs and masterpieces; in front of paintings from Couder to Picot’s Tsarina.¹⁸⁷ I mistook him for a character by Curtius, in which the wax has come out rather too yellow, or for an automaton that was crossing the Louvre to take up its place at the exposition of French industry.” During those final years, Talleyrand’s personal appearance seemed to be suggesting that the whole of history, guided by him, was about to enter the Grévin Wax Museum. The bourgeois age was sick of history—and this sometimes gave it a conceited glee. But it dared not recognize that that sickness was the consequence of an impalpable fact: the cutting of the family knot that tied the present to past history. In Saint-Simon the generations of peers and bastards are entangled in that knot, the dead are still living at Versailles a few apartments away. But with Michelet everything is hallucination—and the present is just an annoyingly faithful hallucination. History as family history is swallowed up forever. Gripped by the bombast of the emancipated, the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe had “always prided themselves on understanding the whole of history,” as Sainte-Beuve sarcastically observed.¹⁸⁸ But they were ready only to set it out in the illustrations of the Magasin pittoresque. The automaton and the waxwork are the new Watchmen at the Gate. Now they must both receive an offering in order to gain access to the future and to the past.

Throughout his life, from his first appearances in public, Talleyrand was the butt of accusations and insults of every kind. Everyone took pleasure in attacking him, from anonymous gazetteers to rulers, to the new emperor and democratic shopkeepers. The motives, varying each time, were corruption, betrayal, treachery, lying, criminal conduct. At the height of the age of Good Feelings, he had the privilege of being the shining image of Evil. After his death, the historians joined in, right until today. His criminal file is a hefty one: allegations mount, they sometimes corroborate each other. At the age of seventy-three, Talleyrand was publicly struck in the face and kicked by his attacker. When Charles X asked him to explain what had happened, he replied: “Sire, it was a punch.” In the life of a politician, insults don’t matter, but humiliations do. For Talleyrand, through all the reversals of fortune and allegiance, there are few actual moments of embarrassment and even fewer moments of humiliation. The worst of these were not the famous scenes in front of Napoleon, with his threats and insults, but two encounters with the king whom Talleyrand had most certainly reinstalled on the throne—Louis XVIII, King Ubu, the old gamekeeper who used to go around shooting at poachers. And, in his eyes, Talleyrand would always remain a poacher, even though his return to France was thanks to him. As Chateaubriand observed, Louis XVIII, “while not being cruel, was not human.”¹⁸⁹ At their meeting at Mons, in the middle of the night, Talleyrand runs limping after the carriage of the king he hadn’t wanted to pay his respects to during the day. “I’m in no hurry,” he had said, in accordance with his principle that “few political dealings are of such a nature that they cannot be delayed.”¹⁹⁰ And yet that night he was woken with a start, had to forgo his long toilette, ran down into the street, supported on the arm of Monsieur de Ricé, only to hear the king’s brief words of derision: “Prince of Benevento, are you leaving us? The waters will do you good: do let us have your news.”¹⁹¹ The other encounter was during the second Restoration, when Talleyrand was head of government and asked his king to pledge him greater trust. Vitrolles recounts: “Monsieur de Talleyrand, generally so skilled at soft insinuation, had no doubt reckoned that he needed to use a more peremptory language this time; the king, who was not accustomed to such tones, was shocked and, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, paused in silence for a moment.¹⁹² ‘Well,’ he eventually answered with a quiet air, ‘I shall choose a new government.’ ” Writing to the Duchess of Courland the following day, Talleyrand would acknowledge the insult he had borne, so far as his style permitted: “His ingratitude is insufficiently concealed.”¹⁹³ None of the many new men with whom Talleyrand had dealings, starting with Napoleon, would have been capable of wounding him so coldly: it required that fat, insensitive man whose only real concern was for his own peace of mind; it required a Bourbon to knock down the Prince, almost without realizing it, an act of revenge that came from deep down in his blood.