him from Strasburgh by the duke was
kept by Talleyrand, and not delivered up till after the execution. He
likewise committed the gross outrage upon public decency of giving a
masked ball to the diplomatic body on the night of the unfortunate
prince's death; and, all the circumstances taken into account, we fear
there can be no doubt of his active participation (to say no more) in
one of the foulest political enormities of modern times. His motive for
allowing himself to be involved in so perilous an enterprise was, as
usual, altogether personal. He dreaded lest a successful conspiracy
formed beyond the Rhine might lead (a vain apprehension) to the
restoration of the Bourbons; and he would seem to have taken this dark
mode of preventing it, for he had offended too deeply to expect
forgiveness. But let us proceed to another theme--his marriage.

It is well known that Napoleon obtained from the fears of the Pope, Pius
VII., a brief of secularization for his Minister for Foreign Affairs,
and that Talleyrand subsequently married Madame Grand, or, as she is
called in this book, Grandt, a lady who had lived with him as his
mistress, and who, in consequence of this transformation, became no less
a personage than the Princesse de Benevento of the Imperial Court. Much
has been written about this woman, whose history was long a mystery; and
of whose ignorance, _etourderies_, and arrogance, every body has heard
something. In this volume her introduction to Talleyrand is related in
the usual melo-dramatic style of French writers, and her beauty
described with that fullness of detail which approaches to
voluptuousness. The meeting was accidental, at least on Talleyrand's
part. Returning at an early hour of the morning from a gambling visit to
the Chevalier Fenelon, the particulars of which are hideous, he found
his study occupied by a female, who had waited for _five_ hours alone in
the chamber; and who was now fast asleep in an arm-chair by the fire,
the upper part of her body enveloped in a fashionable mantle, and the
lower part displaying the gilded finery of a ball-dress. The diplomatist
was stupefied by the fair vision, which he gazed upon with admiration,
and having tried in vain to awaken her by coughing, and other innocent
devices, he took up a letter addressed to himself which lay upon the
table, and which he found to be from a friend, requesting him to give
madame the benefit of his advice in a difficulty in which no one els