‘I contributed almost nothing to the conversation,’ he recorded after one such evening. ‘Metternich and Talleyrand went on in their usual way. Meanwhile I was overcome as never before by the futility of all human endeavour and the foibles of those who hold the world in their hands, as well as by my own superiority; but all this half-unconsciously, and as though lost in a fog that descended on my mind from the empty twaddle of these gentlemen …’
