IX
The society of Paris was never more “piquante,” if I may borrow an expression from the language of the country of which I am speaking, than at this moment. Nobody was rich. Pomp and ceremony were banished; few private houses were open: a great desire for amusement existed; there were no pretensions to rank, for who would have ventured to boast of his birth? There was no drawing into sets or cliques, for such would still have been considered as conspiracies. People lived together in public fêtes, in public gardens, at theatres, at subscription-balls, like those of Marbeuf, where the grocer’s wife and the monseigneur’s danced in the same quadrille; each being simply qualified by the title of “citoyenne.” The only real distinction was that of manners. An active, artful, popular man of the world, amidst such a confused assemblage of all orders, bent on being amused, had full play for his social and political qualities. But this was not all; with the taste for gaiety had also returned the taste for letters. Here, again, M. de Talleyrand found means to excite attention. I have said that, during his absence from France he had been elected a member of the National Institute, which owed its origin, as I have noticed, to the propositions he had laid before the National Assembly just previous to its dissolution. He had also been chosen its secretary; and it was in this capacity that he now addressed to the moral and scientific class, to which he belonged, two memoirs: the one on the commercial relations between England and the United States, and the other on colonies generally. There are few writings of this kind that contain so many just ideas in so small a compass. In the first, the author gives a general description of the state of American society, the calm character, the various and peculiar habits, the Saxon laws, and religious feelings of that rising community. He then shows, what was at that time little understood, that the mother country had gained more than she had lost by the separation; and that the wants of Americans connected them with English interests, while their language, education, history, and laws, gave them feelings, which, if properly cultivated, would be—English.
The memoir on colonisation, however, is even superior to the preceding one; it is in this memoir on colonisation that M. de Talleyrand points out—for he even then perceived what has since been gradually taking place—the impossibility of long continuing slave labour or of maintaining those colonies which required it. He foresaw that such colonies existed in the face of sentiments which must, whether rightly or wrongly, in a few years sweep them away. He looked out for other settlements to supply their place; and Egypt and the African coast are the spots to which, with a singular prescience, he directed the attention of his country; whose inhabitants he describes, from their sense of fatigue, from their desire of excitement, and in many instances, from their disappointment and discontent, to be peculiarly in want of new regions of rest, of enterprise, and of change.
“The art of putting the right men in the right places” (the phrase is not, I may observe en passant, of to-day’s invention), he observes profoundly, “is perhaps the first in the science of government; but,” he adds, “the art of finding a satisfactory position for the discontented is the most difficult.
“To present distant scenes to their imaginations, views agreeable to their thoughts and desires, is,” he says, “I think, one of the solutions of this social problem.”35
In three weeks after the reading of this memoir, M. de Talleyrand accepted the office of minister of foreign affairs.