"I pity you," said M.de Talleyrand to M.de Remusat, "you have to amuse the unamusable." At the theatre he is abstracted or yawns.

Applause is prohibited; the court, sitting out "the file of eternal tragedies, is mortally bored....

the young ladies fall asleep, people leave the theatre, gloomy and discontented."-- There is the same constraint in the drawing-room.

"He did not know how to appear at ease, and I believe that he never wanted anybody else to be so, afraid of the slightest approach to familiarity, and inspiring each with a fear of saying something offensive to his neighbor before witnesses....

During the quadrille, he moves around amongst the rows of ladies, addressing them with some trifling or disagreeable remark," and never does he accost them otherwise than "awkwardly and ill at his ease." At bottom, he distrusts them and is ill-disposed toward them.[1290] It is because "the power they have acquired in society seems to him an intolerable usurpation.--"Never did he utter to a woman a graceful or even a well-turned compliment, although the effort to find one was often apparent on his face and in the tone of his voice....