Talleyrand saw that the difference between the age in which he had been born—an age that was cyclical, ceremonial, though no longer ritualistic—and the experimental age that surrounded him at eighty (and still expected him at least to sort out the Belgian question) lay not just in what was being produced but in what was coming to an end. The Princesse de Vaudémont died on New Year’s Eve 1833. She spent her last years surrounded by animals. She was generous to the poor. Talleyrand had first met her fifty years earlier, with his mistress and patron Comtesse de Brionne. Since then they regarded each other as friends. It was at her house that Talleyrand had made his peace with Fouché and had listened with mild indulgence to the intrigues of Aimée de Coigny. Those teas were held in the “most dangerous place for an unstable government.²³⁰ There, it was safe to plot. The armchairs were so comfortable, the life so pleasant and so inconsequential, that spies used to doze off.” Napoleon, in the meantime, had fallen from power and died; and so, too, once again, had the Bourbons. Casimir, Comte de Montrond—libertine, gambler, crook, ready for any kind of shady enterprise, the man in whom many saw the dark soul of Talleyrand, since they wanted to attribute a dark soul even to the Devil—saw the Prince weep only once, when news of his old friend the Princesse de Vaudémont’s death reached him in London. Talleyrand noted: “It is a feature of these times that certain things in what we call society are coming to a complete end.²³¹ At one time a famous salon, or a person who was influential in spirit or judgment, was replaced by another. All that we can clearly see today is what is lost. All that will be reborn is still hidden.—And so, despite all the mischief of the young, I find this to be the golden age of the old; and it proves that society itself is coming to an end.” The old man would no longer be the intermediary for experiment, since that experiment ended each time with him. But in this way he became something all the more mysterious and impressive; a stone left abandoned in a field, carved by an unknown hand, in accordance with unknown rules. The physiognomies of these survivors, deprived of all progeny, stand out in solitude: their uselessness is magnificent, the wisdom that perhaps they do not have and they certainly do not wish to transmit looks at us in silence like every memory that accepts self-destruction.