nd as circumstances
warranted, and no more. He was no believer in the reality of
virtue--itself a quality of which he had but an inadequate conception,
and to the active operation of which he would have held it to be mere
simplicity and folly to trust. We may infer, therefore, that what he did
not look for he did not find; and that, as generally happens to those
who are wise beyond what is written, he denied the existence of a
property, with the use of which, could it have been discovered, he was
wholly unacquainted. He served the emperor so long as it was consistent
with his interests to do so, and he deserted him when he saw that there
was more peril in fidelity than in apostasy. The Restoration was, in a
great measure, the work of his hands, though he hated Louis XVIII.
mortally; and the grounds of that hatred were, apparently, personal,
resting partly on those antipathies which dissimilarity in habits and
taste is apt to generate in all ranks of life, and partly on
disappointed ambition. Louis was fat; Talleyrand was thin. Louis liked
good eating (most men do, by the way, be they kings or not); Talleyrand
cared little for it, and ate but once a day. Louis had, rightly or
wrongly, an idea that he was an independent monarch, to whose volitions
some regard was due, and the legitimate sovereign of one of the greatest
kingdoms in Europe; Talleyrand saw in him only a political stop-gap and
glutton, to whose wishes little deference was owing, and whose intellect
he despised: but he took care not to refuse the bounties or the honors
bestowed upon him by his royal master--nor can we repress a smile when
we find such a man gravely rebuking that prince for utter heartlessness
and selfishness. It might be, and probably was so, but assuredly
Talleyrand was not the person to make the charge.

The erection of the throne of the Barricades was also Talleyrand's work,
if we may believe M. Colmache; and many of the incidents connected with
the expulsion of Charles X., and the elevation of the Duke of Orleans,
which are given in this volume, possess at this moment an instructive
and melancholy interest, when we consider where the aspirant for that
perilous honor is now, and what a dark cloud has settled down upon the
stormy evening of his ambitious life.[21] Had we space, we would give
some of these details; but we have not, and must be contented to refer
to the book for them. The object of the writer, however, is, to
construct an excu