The Languor of a Park in Berry

The Prince is now in his eighties. He has brought peace once more to Europe by settling the Belgian problem. He is lord of the chateau of Valençay, living under the protection of his beloved niece Dorothée, the Duchess of Dino. He notes down ordinary, liquid words, surfacing behind monotony, the final curtain: “I organize my life so that it is monotonous, I want to close myself up behind domestic concerns.²²⁶ I am not happy, I am not unhappy; my health is not good, but it is not bad; I have no pains nor illnesses; I am fading gently and, if this state of languor doesn’t cease, I don’t know how it might end. But this neither grieves me nor does it frighten me. My business is done. I have planted some trees, built a house, done various other foolish things; isn’t it time to end it?” Yet sometimes, almost unwittingly, he lets slip certain disarming phrases that offer glimpses of his past and his inner thoughts: “Nothing makes me suffer, because I am prepared for everything”; “I do not struggle against destiny.”^{227, 228}

The Duke of Orléans, son of Louis Philippe, while staying at Valençay, had occasion to see the plaster casts of the legs of Talleyrand’s women friends. On each was carved the model’s name. Thus, over many decades, the Prince had had woven for them soft stockings. By now they were nearly all dead.

History’s curs threw themselves at Talleyrand, snarling because, it was said, he would never believe in anything, not even in history itself, the ultima dea. Yet the aristocratic Talleyrand once told the creature he most loved, the aristocratic Madame de Dino: “There is nothing less aristocratic than incredulity.”²²⁹