Excerpt from Things Seen

In the Rue Saint-Florentin there are a palace and a sewer.

The palace, which is of a rich, handsome, and gloomy style of architecture, was long called Hotel de l'lnfantado; nowadays may be seen on the frontal of its principal doorway Hotel Talleyrand. During the forty years that he resided in this street, the last tenant of this palace never, perhaps, cast his eyes upon this sewer.

He was a strange, redoubtable, and important personage ; his name was Charles Maurice de Perigord ; he was of noble descent, like Machiavelli, a priest like Gondi, unfrocked like Fouche, witty like Voltaire, and lame like the devil. It might be averred that everything in him was lame like himself, - the nobility which he had placed at the service of the Republic, the priesthood which he had dragged through the parade-ground, then cast into the gutter, the marriage which he had broken off through a score of exposures and a voluntary separation, the understanding which he disgraced by acts of baseness.

This man, nevertheless, had grandeur ; the splendours of the two regimes were united in him: he was Prince de Vaux in the Kingdom of France, and a Prince of the French Empire.

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