blessed boon of
heaven, which caused him to suffer the coarse black robe to be thrown at
once above his college uniform, without a cry, without a murmur? None
will ever be able to divine what his feelings were, for this one
incident is always passed over by the prince. He never refers to it,
even when in familiar conversation with his most loved intimates. It is
certain, therefore, that the single hour of which I speak bore with it a
whole life of bitterness and agony. (P. 106, 107.)"

Let us pause for a moment to consider the probable effects of such
nurture and treatment on a nature like Talleyrand's. He was fifteen
years of age; imperfectly educated for his station in life; lame, from
the neglect of the guardians of his infancy; disinherited by those who
should have watched with the most jealous care over his interests;
cruelly punished for a physical defect chargeable to the carelessness of
others; a stranger to hope, love, and fear; the victim of a domestic
conspiracy; and the novitiate of a profession which he loathed, and to
which, in his subsequent years, he did dishonor. His father he had never
known, his mother he knew only as his tormentor and oppressor: no tie
seems to have bound him to his brother, and up to this hour he had never
yet slept one night under the paternal roof. These were no ordinary
trials; and if the youth who was subjected to them became in after-life
a cynic, is it to be wondered at? Indeed, a hasty view of this
remarkable man's character might lead to the conclusion of M. Colmache,
that the untoward accidents of his infancy and boyhood afforded an
explanation of all his adult peculiarities; but we can not allow
ourselves to accept this inference, natural as it would seem to be, for
it appears to us, upon a closer inspection, that though these incidents
might deepen the force of his mental inequalities, they could not have
created them, and that the difference between the Bishop of Autun and
the ancient noble, had he succeeded to his inheritance, would have
amounted to little more than the difference between a proscribed
ecclesiastic and a proscribed aristocrat. No doubt, if the generous
affections expand and blossom under genial culture, they as certainly
contract and wither under neglect and harshness; nor should we, in
ordinary cases, have any hesitation in giving the benefit of this
elementary rule to the subject of an ordinary biography: but
Talleyrand's is not such. There is no evide