the beginning of September. Rivarol and LalleyTollendal and many other constitutionalists were there. Fox and Sheridan and their friends afforded a fairly large circle of English acquaintances. Lord Lansdowne continued friendly long after he left England. At his house Talleyrand speaks of frequently meeting Hastings, Price, Priestly, Romilly, and Jeremy Bentham. His reputation for culture and conversation opened many doors. Sydney Smith was brought in contact with him somewhere, and says that he found him unequal to his reputation; but one imagines that Sydney Smith would not be unbiassed, and he admits he could not understand his French. The German physician, Bollmann, found him so charming that he "could listen to him for years.' On the whole, Talleyrand fared better than most of his indigent companions, though the enforced idleness annoyed him. "Patience and sleep," he told Mme. de Staël, was his programme for the present. In another letter he described his chief occupations as "fishing and correcting proofs " (of Mme. de Flahaut's novel).

It is from the letters he wrote to Mme. de Staël after her return to France that we find he is still watching the situation in that country without despair. In one letter he sketches a plan. The southern provinces, which still show some attachment to the constitution, should unite, and invite the members of the old Constituent Assembly to meet at Toulon. He believes that the nation is still attached to the

constitution, and that it is really in the supposed defence of this that they have risen against King and invaders. When he hears of the execution of the Queen he has to modify his view. "It is all over with the house of Bourbon in France," he says; but he never believed that France would remain permanently republican. His wistful speculations, which were equally resented by republicans in France and royalists out of it (who charged the constitutionalists with bringing all his misfortunes on the King), were cut short at the beginning of 1794 by a peremptory order to quit England within five days (in another place Talleyrand says twenty-four hours).

The order was inexcusable, but no influence that Talleyrand could command had any effect on it. A law had been passed twelve months before empowering the Government to expel undesirable aliens, and it had been applied to Noel and Chauvelin. Talleyrand may have feared its extension to him at first, when he applied for residence in Tuscany, but he was not prepared for this cruel application after twelve months of peaceful life in London. He pressed his most influential friends to obtain some explanation, at least, of the order, but none was given. In the end, he attributed it to intrigues of his emigrant enemies, and one can see no other reason for it. He was the only distinguished Frenchman of moderate views to incur the order. Sainte-Beuve says it "proves he was not in the odour of virtue." It, at all events, proved, if this needed proof, that he had

enemies. He protested to Pitt and to the King, but it was no use, and he took ship for America on February 3rd. His letters to Lord Lansdowne and Mme. de Staël show a very natural bitterness of feeling, but even at this time he hardly blamed England. But when the ship was detained at Greenwich he refused an invitation from Dundas to spend the time at his house, saying that he could not set foot on English soil again after receiving such an order.

The romantic biographers have enlivened his voyage with adventures. They tell how the Dutch vessel in which he sailed was stopped and searched by an English frigate, and Talleyrand dressed himself in the cook's clothes to pass the scrutiny. M. Michaud, as usual, does not deign to mention his authority. Talleyrand only says that the ship was beaten back by heavy storms, and seemed at one time in danger of being driven on the French coast. It did put in at Falmouth for repairs, and Talleyrand landed there, so that his objection to English soil was relaxing. He was told that an American general was staying at an inn in the town, and he found that it was General Arnold, who would hardly give him an attractive picture of his future home. Whether it was from this conversation, or from a real weariness of spirit (or, in fine, a freak of memory in later years), he says that he did not want to leave ship when they reached Philadelphia. Another ship was sailing out as they reached the mouth of the Delaware, and he sent a boat to learn its destination. It was going to Calcutta,