Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/407

Rh and, in the struggle for class government, was once thought of as the head of an extra-parliamentary Ministry on the American model, was much consulted as a shrewd adviser, steeped in the knowledge of public and private affairs. The business of the day left him without time or care for remoter things, and he lightly eluded inquiry into his precious deposit. He communicated the manuscript to the Count of Paris, though he refused it to his friend Thiers ; and he died, bequeathing it to the distinguished writer, who is at the same time a party leader and the bearer of an historic name.

Talleyrand is not favourable to men in authority, or to precepts of attachment and respect. His Memoirs forcibly proclaim that there is no such thing in reason as personal loyalty to a party or a man ; that whoever serves one order ^of things, does well to be preparing for the next ; that it is the note of a strong man to employ principles, and of a weak man to obey them. They are especially injurious to the house of Orleans ; and a passage relating to Philippe Egalité is the one portion of the manuscript which has been allowed to disappear. This hiatus of several sheets raises the question of the second copy. The Duke de Broglie publishes the final and authentic text ; but an earlier transcript exists, and bears marks of having been retouched by the author himself. For appreciable reasons, its possessor has never chosen, hitherto, to make any use of it ; but it will now be known whether it completes the published text and throws light on the successive growth of the Memoirs. Two or three passages are evidently later insertions ; some were written earlier ; and it will be interesting to inquire whether the Spanish and the Roman chapters are entirely the work of Talleyrand himself. One of them is hardly in keeping with the usually secular turn of his mind, and both are out of perspective.

French critics will easily detect inaccuracies, besides those which the editor has pointed out and corrected. It is not true that the Austrians were defeated in Germany in 1796 ; Carnot never was at Cayenne ; Oudinot was not