llectual acuteness and of
resentment against his family, which had disinherited him for the
crime of lameness, he had led the first assaults of 1789 against the
privileges of the nobles and of the clerics among whom his lot had
perforce been cast. He acted as the head of the new "constitutional"
clergy, and bestowed his episcopal blessing at the Feast of Pikes in
1790; but, owing to his moderation, he soon fell into disfavour with
the extreme men who seized on power. After a sojourn in England and
the United States, he came back to France, and on the suggestion of
Madame de Stael was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs (July,
1797). To this post he brought the highest gifts: his early clerical
training gave a keen edge to an intellect naturally subtle and
penetrating: his intercourse with Mirabeau gave him a grip on the
essentials of sound policy and diplomacy: his sojourn abroad widened
his vision, and imbued him with an admiration for English institutions
and English moderation. Yet he loved France with a deep and fervent
love. For her he schemed; for her he threw over friends or foes with a
Macchiavellian 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 w