Yet he loved France with a deep and fervent love.

For her he schemed; for her he threw over friends or foes with a Macchiavellian facility.

Amidst all the glamour of the Napoleonic Empire he discerned the dangers that threatened France; and he warned his master--as uselessly as he warned reckless nobles, priestly bigots, and fanatical Jacobins in the past, or the unteachable zealots of the restored monarchy.

His life, when viewed, not in regard to its many sordid details, but to its chief guiding principle, was one long campaign against French _elan_ and partisan obstinacy; and he sealed it with the quaint declaration in his will that, on reviewing his career, he found he had never abandoned a party before it had abandoned itself.

Talleyrand was equipped with a diversity of gifts: his gaze, intellectual yet composed, blenched not when he uttered a scathing criticism or a diplomatic lie: his deep and penetrating voice gave force to all his words, and the curl of his lip or the scornful lifting of his eyebrows sometimes disconcerted an opponent more than his biting sarcasm.