They respected each other for their supreme powers of conversation: but Talleyrand developed a coldness and impatience toward her. In 1812, he told Madame de Kielmannsegge: “If Madame de Staël finds me a cruel being, one thing at least is certain: intellectually, she makes me cringe.”²¹⁹ The Marquise de Beaulaincourt told Edmond de Goncourt she had dined twice in her life with Talleyrand, and on both occasions she had heard him tell the same story about how the Neckers had had to order a “tourne-cuisses” for their daughter to correct her legs and feet.²²⁰ For a long time Madame de Staël tried not to forgive Talleyrand’s infidelities, neglect, and unkindness, but to no avail. In her novels she felt compelled to introduce a character based on him: in Delphine she transformed him into a woman, Madame de Vernon, in whom we recognize a shrewd description of Talleyrand’s coldness: “No one knows better than I how to exploit indolence: I use it to undo, with perfect naturalness, the activity of others … I have never taken the trouble of wanting something, except for three or four times in my life; but whenever I decide to make such an effort, nothing can detract me from my purpose, and I do achieve it, you can be sure.”²²¹ Once, in a letter of 1809 from Geneva, Madame de Staël was able to use the only words to Talleyrand that could pierce his invisible armor: “Good-bye.²²² Are you happy? With such a superior spirit, don’t you occasionally arrive at the bottom of everything, I mean at sorrow?”

But Talleyrand had already indirectly replied to Madame de Staël, whom he so ridiculed. The words in that letter penetrate to such a degree that his zealous band of critics couldn’t even notice. What were infidelity, corruption, venality, cruelty in the face of that damning accusation that he was ignorant of sorrow? One day in 1808, with Madame de Rémusat—another friend, another excellent conversationalist, but not as imperious and pushy as Madame de Staël—Talleyrand had hinted at an answer. Perhaps it was due to her ability to “stir his soul, so often slumbering by custom, by character, and by indifference,” that he told her: “Il eût peut-être mieux valu souffrir …” (“It would perhaps have been better to have suffered …”).^{223, 224} In Talleyrand’s system, this phrase—perhaps the only sublime phrase among his many bons mots—was similar to that of Flaubert’s: “Ils sont dans le vrai …” (“They are in the right …”). Both men were gripped by a jealous and despotic vocation: writing, for Flaubert, meant that life had to be killed; living les grandes affaires, for Talleyrand, meant that it was sorrow that had to be killed. The craftsman’s mask was pasted to their faces—and it couldn’t leave them for even a moment without them becoming deformed, sincere. They continued on to the last, unflinchingly. The files crammed with quotes for Bouvard et Pécuchet were, for one of them, what the negotiations in 1831 on the Belgium question were for the other. And above all, the long, flawless death, interspersed with various moments of pardon from the Church, mother of sorrows. With a whorl of funereal rococo, Franz Blei commented: “Over this belated nostalgia for sorrow is drawn the mask and the legend that call themselves Talleyrand.”²²⁵