his coloring: but,
so far as we can discover, he never allowed himself to indulge in
unnecessary commentaries or disclosures, and, with all his diligence, M.
Colmache was unable to extract out of the wily diplomatist a single idea
which it was his desire to conceal. Let there be no mistake, then, about
the character of these _Revelations_. They are always amusing, sometimes
highly interesting, and at others instructive: but they furnish
exceedingly little toward a life of Talleyrand; and what his own
countrymen are unable to give, foreigners can not supply. In what
follows, therefore, we must be both abrupt and irregular.

Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord, eldest son of the Comte de
Talleyrand-Perigord, was born at Paris in the year 1754; and died in
that city in the year 1838, at the advanced age of eighty-four. His
father was by position a member of the ancient _noblesse_, and by
profession, a soldier: his mother a woman of fashion, and attached to
the court. According to M. Colmache, he came into the world "without
spot or blemish," and we are led to infer that his lameness--the cause
of so much suffering and injustice to him in after-life--was not
congenital, as has been generally believed, but the result of want of
care in his childhood; for, as it was not the custom in those days for
women of rank to nurse their own offspring, or even to rear them in
their own houses, the future diplomatist was removed to a distant part
of the country a few days after his birth, and consigned to the care of
a hired nurse, Mere Rigaut, in whose cottage, wild, neglected, and
forgotten, he dwelt, for twelve years. He was at length recalled from
his involuntary exile by the Bailli Talleyrand, his uncle--the youngest
brother of his father, a naval officer, and a knight of Malta; who, with
the warmth of feeling proper to men of his profession, was enraged, upon
his return home, to find the poor boy condemned to banishment and
obscurity, and determined to free him from both. He accordingly brought
him to Paris, but was sadly mortified to find that his intention of
making him a sailor was marred by his infirmity; and leaving him at the
hotel Talleyrand in charge of the parties whom his mother had instructed
to receive him--for she was not there to perform that maternal duty
herself--the honest Bailli set out for Toulon, where he rejoined his
ship, and was drowned at sea a few months afterward. Young Talleyrand
was now placed at the Co