Talleyrand had been galled by his dismissal in 1815, and while he affected to withdraw from politics he could not resist making trouble for Louis XVIII and his new government, even resorting to opportunistic alliances with ultra royalists to do so. His witty jibes earned him disgrace at court, but he was triumphant. He had done well financially out of the congress, and in 1817 he sold a sizeable batch of the French Foreign Ministry’s archives, which he had somehow managed to remove, to Metternich for 500,000 francs and the promise that he would be given asylum in Austria should the situation
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