with a
Machiavellian facility. Amidst all the glamour of the Napoleonic
Empire he discerned the dangers that threatened France; and he warned
his master--as uselessly as he warned reckless nobles, priestly
bigots, and fanatical Jacobins in the past, or the unteachable zealots
of the restored monarchy. His life, when viewed, not in regard to its
many sordid details, but to its chief guiding principle, was one long
campaign against French _elan_ and partisan obstinacy; and he sealed
it with the quaint declaration in his will that, on reviewing his
career, he found he had never abandoned a party before it had
abandoned itself. Talleyrand was equipped with a diversity of gifts:
his gaze, intellectual yet composed, blenched not when he uttered a
scathing criticism or a diplomatic lie: his deep and penetrating voice
gave force to all his words, and the curl of his lip or the scornful
lifting of his eyebrows sometimes disconcerted an opponent more than
his biting sarcasm. In brief, this disinherited noble, this unfrocked
priest, this disenchanted Liberal, was the complete expression of the
inimitable society of the old _regime_, when quickened intellectually
by Voltaire and dulled by the Terror. After doing much to destroy the
old society, he was now to take a prominent share in its
reconstruction on a modern basis.[87]

Such was the man who now commenced his chief life-work, the task of
guiding Napoleon. "The mere name of Bonaparte is an aid which ought to
smooth away all my difficulties"--these were the obsequious terms in
which he began his correspondence with the great general. In reality,
he distrusted him; but whether from diffidence, or from the weakness
of his own position, which as yet was little more than that of
the head clerk of his department, he did nothing to assert the
predominance of civil over military influence in the negotiations now
proceeding.

Two months before Talleyrand accepted office, Bonaparte had enlarged
his original demands on Austria, and claimed for France the whole of
the lands on the left or west bank of the Rhine, and for the Cisalpine
Republic all the territory up to the River Adige. To these demands the
Court of Vienna offered a tenacious resistance which greatly irritated
him. "These people are so slow," he exclaimed, "they think that a
peace like this ought to be meditated upon for three years first."

Concurrently with the Franco-Austrian negotiations, overtures for a
peace between