public and private conduct of
Monsieur T----has been so much talked of, it may, perhaps, excite some
surprise, when it is mentioned that several persons who know him well,
some of whom esteem him, and with some of whom he is not a favourite,
declare, notwithstanding the anecdotes related of X Y, and Monsieur
Beaucoup d'Argent, in the american prints, that they consider him to be
a man, whose mind is raised above the influence of corruption. Monsieur
T----may be classed amongst the rarest curiosities in the revolutionary
cabinet. Allied by an illustrious ancestry to the Bourbons, and a
royalist from his birth, he was, with unusual celerity, invested with
the episcopal robe and crosier[11]. During the temporary triumph of the
abstract rights of man, over the practicable rights of reason, he moved
with the boisterous cavalcade, with more caution than enthusiasm. Upon
the celebrated national recognition of the sovereignty of man's _will_,
in the Champs de Mars, the politic minister, adorned in snowy robes, and
tricolor ribands, presided at the altar of the republic as its high
priest, and bestowed his patriarchal benedictions upon the standard of
France, and the banners of her departments.

[11] Monsieur Talleyrand is ex-bishop of Autun.

Some time afterwards, in the shape of a secret unaccredited negotiator,
he was discovered in the metropolis of England, and immediately
transferred, upon the spread wings of the alien bill, to his own shores.
Since that period, after having dissociated and neutralized the most
formidable foes of his country, by the subtle stratagems of his
consummate diplomacy, we beheld him as the successor of la Croix, armed
with the powers, and clothed in the gaudy costume of the minister of
foreign relations. In the _polished Babel_ of the antichamber of this
extraordinary man, I have beheld the starred and glittering
representatives of the most distinguished princes of the earth waiting
for hours, with exemplary resignation, contemplating themselves, in all
their positions, in his reduplicating mirrors, or examining the
splendour and exquisite ingenuity of his time pieces, until the silver
sound of his little bell announced, that the invoked and lagging moment
of ministerial leisure was arrived.

It is certain that few people possess the valuable qualities of
imperturbable calmness and self possession, more than Monsieur T----.
Balanced by these amiable and valuable qualities, he has been enabled to