Lord Palmerston entered into Talleyrand's plans. England confined herself to a few nautical parades in the Black Sea, but from this time a coldness sprung up between the two diplomatists. The English minister is a person of very irritable temper, touchy, and of a changeable disposition, and Talleyrand took a great dislike to him; and as, on the other side, the cabinet of which Lord Melbourne was the chief was drawn on from one concession to another, he soon resolved to leave England. It was announced that his health was failing, and he went into the country to seek peace in retirement. Like Pythagoras when the thunder is heard from afar, Talleyrand preferred the desert and the echo. During his last journey to Paris he became friends with Count Pozzo di Borgo, that is to say, with the Russian idea. The two diplomatists did not venture as yet to hold any official communications, but they often met in little mysterious banquets, in a diplomatic retreat at Bellevue.
Talleyrand quitted London, popular clamour was a source of annoyance to him; it was no longer a dispute between one portion of the aristocracy and another, from henceforth it appeared to be the people against the aristocracy itself: and the stake was too great. He therefore left England definitively for Valençay, explaining, in a most dignified letter, the reason of his retirement. There is a period with politicians when they begin to live for posterity; they then all seek an opportunity of explaining themselves, of laying open their conduct, and striving to rectify the judgment of future times--they feel a desire of revealing themselves solemnly to the public; and such was the motive which induced Talleyrand to speak at a meeting of the French Institute. He said but a few words on the occasion of an _éloge_ that had been pronounced, but those few afforded an explanation of the motives that had actuated a long and busy political life, passed in the midst of governments, passions, and parties.
After this time Talleyrand lived either in Paris or on his estates in the country, and was always consulted with the most profound veneration by all the thinking heads of government. He at one time had some idea of going to Vienna to accomplish a plan suggested by the Duchess de Dino, which would unite the two families of Talleyrand and Esterhazy. The latter, it is well known, is the richest family in Austria, and during the last seven years Madame de Dino had paid great attention to her uncle's affairs, and had been so successful in her management that his property was quite free from debt, and one of the most considerable of the present day. The fortune of M. de Talleyrand, after so many reverses, is said almost to resemble one of the fairy tales in the "Arabian Nights."