he leading characters in France before and
during the Revolution. He was then still a bishop. He had, I believe,
been originally forced into holy orders, in consequence of his lameness,
by his family, who, on that account, treated him with an indifference
and unkindness shameful and shocking. He was for some time _aumonier_ to
his uncle, the Archbishop of Rheims; and when Mr. Pitt went to that town
to learn French, after the peace of 1782, he lodged him in an apartment
in the abbey of St. Thierry, where he was then residing with his uncle,
and constantly accompanied him for six weeks, a circumstance to which,
as I have heard M. Talleyrand remark with some asperity, Mr. Pitt never
had the grace to allude either during his embassy, or his emigration, or
in 1794, when he refused to recall the cruel order by which he was sent
away from England under the alien bill. Talleyrand was initiated into
public affairs under M. de Calonne, and learnt from that lively minister
the happy facility of transacting business without effort and without
ceremony in the corner of a drawing-room, or in the recess of a window."

Again--of Talleyrand's bon-mots. The bit at Chateaubriand is one of the
happiest we can remember.

"'Il faut avoir aime Mme. de Stael pour connaitre tout le bonheur
d'aimer une bete,' was a saying of his much quoted at Paris at that
time, in explanation of his passion for Mme. Grand, who certainly did
not win him or any one else by the fascination of her wit or
conversation. For thirty or forty years, the bon-mots of M. de
Talleyrand were more frequently repeated and more generally admired
than those of any living man. The reason was obvious. Few men uttered so
many, and yet fewer any equally good. By a happy combination of neatness
in language and ease and suavity of manner, with archness and sagacity
of thought, his sarcasms assumed a garb at once so courtly and so
careless, that they often diverted almost as much as they could mortify
even their immediate objects. His humorous reproof to a gentleman
vaunting with self-complacency the extreme beauty of his mother, and
apparently implying that it might account for advantages in person in
her descendants, is well known: 'Cetait donc,' said he, 'Monsieur votre
pere qui n'etait pas si bien.' The following is more recent, but the
humor of it hardly less arch or less refined. The celebrity of M. de
Chateaubriand, the vainest of mortals, was on the wane. About the same
time,