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Rh convictions he expressed when circumstances did not sway him, and his language was apart from his interest, this is what we find. His Memoirs, letters, and State papers contain a buried picture not unlike the familiar one on the surface of history. The old lines are not effaced. We have not got to expunge from memory the unscrupulous priest, the money-getting Sybarite, the patient auxiliary of the conqueror and the tyrant, the Royalist who defended the tenth of August, the Republican minister who brought on the Empire, the imperial dignitary who restored the Bourbons, the apostle of legitimacy who hailed its fall. The Talleyrand of manifold tradition remains, and he remains a more valuable study than the most consistent doctrinaire.

But the doctrine is there as well as the policy, and the contrast gives an import to his life beyond any measure of practical success. It was characteristic of his public conduct repeatedly to undo his own work, and the problem is to find any constant motive under the glaring outer inconsistencies. Principles, in his easy philosophy, depended a good deal upon circumstances for their available use ; and his saying that non-intervention is a term that means about the same thing as intervention, was more than a jest. Accustomed to hold dogmas loosely and conditionally, even in the science of which he was master, he described his own principle of legitimacy as nothing more than a supreme expedient. He gives the keynote at once by declaring that he will not call his Memoirs "My view of the events of my time," because that would be too positive a title for the work of a man qui a autant que moi douté dans sa vie. He understands the economists and believes in their doctrines, but he confesses that, having found human nature a poor material to carry them out with, he cheerfully ceased to care about them. Wessenberg records that he heard him say, "Le seul bon principe est n’en rien avoir aucun." The interior Talleyrand is a man with a nucleus of distinct opinions, which have not enough sanctity, or even certainty, to be worth the waste of an existence. He knows his