‘I left power without great regret,’ Talleyrand noted in his memoirs. In fact, he was furious. He also left it with a sense of foreboding, judging by a monologue which he delivered himself one evening to Madame de Rémusat. ‘There is no government, there is only the will of the Emperor of Russia,’ he lamented. ‘I was obliged to take the part of France against him, and I lost. But what madness! To take up the cause of France when one has only the Duke of Wellington on one’s side, and not even the support of France itself, which understands nothing. France is no longer, that is what I should have
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