Church, _nolens volens_. Monsieur Calvert," he said, smiling
seriously, "when you hear Mr. Jefferson criticising the Bishop
of Autun--for I know he thinks but slightingly of the
ecclesiastic--recollect that 'twas the disappointed ambition and the
unrelenting commands of Charles Maurice Talleyrand's parents which made
him what he is! We are all like that," he went on, moodily. "Look at de
Ligne--he was married by his father at twenty to a young girl whom he
had never seen until a week before the wedding. And Madame de
Flahaut--at fifteen she was sacrificed to a man of fifty-five, who
scarcely notices her existence!" He glanced across the table and again
the power of love touched and softened his face for an instant. He
rose--for the supper was finished and the company beginning to move--and
laid his hand for an instant on Calvert's broad young shoulder. "Mr.
Calvert," he said, half-mockingly, half-seriously, "do not be too hard
upon us! There are some excuses to be made. In your country all things
are new--your laws, your habits, your civilization are yet plastic. See
that you mould them well! 'Tis too late here--we are as the generations
have made us. 'Other places--other customs!'" and he went off limping.

To his dying day Mr. Calvert never forgot the fascination, the open
frankness of Monsieur de Talleyrand's manner on that occasion, nor the
look of sadness and suffering in his eyes. When he heard him in after
years accused of shameless veniality, of trickery, lying, duplicity,
even murder, he always remembered that impulsive revelation--never
repeated--of a warped, unhappy childhood, of a perverted destiny.

Mr. Morris came to him later as he stood leaning against the wall behind
the chair of Madame de Chastellux.

"How goes it, Ned?" he asked, half-laughing and stifling a yawn. "As for
myself, I am getting confoundedly bored. I can't think of any more
verses, so the ladies find me insipid, and they are beginning to talk
politics, of which they know nothing, so I find them ridiculous. They
are already deep in the discussion of the Abbe Sieyes's brochure,
'Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat,' and Madame de Flahaut declares that his
writings and opinions will form a new epoch in politics as those of
Newton in physics! Can fatuity go farther? And yet she is the cleverest
woman I have met in France. The men are as ignorant as the women,
except that scoundrel of a bishop, who, like myself, is bored by the
incessant talk of p