These sketches have the power of simplicity. Hugo attempts in them none of those vast and Dore-like effects which in his more important works became eventually a blemish. He draws Talleyrand in a few lines: "He was of noble descent, like Machiavel, 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 --- he received the confession of Mirabeau and the first confidence of Thiers.
"In the Rue Saint Florentin, Hugo says, there is a palace and a sewer. Talleyrand lived in the palace, where he wove his webs that took in all Europe, but he never looked at the sewer. After his death, the doctors who made the autopsy left his brain on a table, and a servant, wondering what was to be done with it, remembered there was a sewer in the street; he went and threw the brain into the sewer..."
