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.  In brief, this disinherited noble, this unfrocked priest, this disenchanted Liberal, was the complete expression of the inimitable society of the old regime, when quickened intellectually by Voltaire and dulled by the Terror.  After doing much to destroy the old society, he was now to take a prominent share in its reconstruction on a modern basis.[87]

Such was the man who now commenced his chief life-work, the task of guiding Napoleon.  “The mere name of Bonaparte is an aid which ought to smooth away all my difficulties”—­these were the obsequious terms in which he began his correspondence with the great general.  In reality, he distrusted him; but whether from diffidence, or from the weakness of his own position, which as yet was little more than that of the head clerk of his department, he did nothing to assert the predominance of civil over military influence in the negotiations now proceeding.

Two months before Talleyrand accepted office, Bonaparte had enlarged his original demands on Austria, and claimed for France the whole of the lands on the left or west bank of the Rhine, and for the Cisalpine Republic all the territory up to the River Adige.  To these demands the Court of Vienna offered a tenacious resistance which greatly irritated him.  “These people are so slow,” he exclaimed, “they think that a peace like this ought to be meditated upon for three years first.”

Concurrently with the Franco-Austrian negotiations, overtures for a peace between France and England were being discussed at Lille.  Into these it is impossible to enter farther than to notice that in these efforts Pitt and the other British Ministers (except Grenville) were sincerely desirous of peace, and that negotiations broke down owing to the masterful tone adopted by the Directory.  It was perhaps unfortunate that Lord Malmesbury was selected as the English negotiator, for his behaviour in the previous year had been construed by the French as dilatory and insincere.  But the Directors may on better evidence be charged with postponing a settlement until they had struck down their foes within France.  Bonaparte’s letters at this time show that he hoped for the conclusion of a peace with England, doubtless in order that his own pressure on Austria might be redoubled.  In this he was to be disappointed.  After Fructidor the Directory assumed overweening airs.  Talleyrand was bidden to enjoin on the French plenipotentiaries the adoption of a loftier tone.  Maret, the French envoy at Lille, whose counsels had ever been on the side of moderation, was abruptly replaced by a “Fructidorian”; and a decisive refusal was given to the English demand for the retention of Trinidad and the Cape, at the expense of Spain and the Batavian Republic respectively.  Indeed, the Directory intended to press for the cession of the Channel Islands to France and of Gibraltar to Spain, and that, too, at the end of a maritime war fruitful in victories for the Union Jack.[88]