Talleyrand arrived in London on September 24, and in a despatch, sent off the next day, expressed his satisfaction at the reception accorded him.[27] He was accompanied by the Duchesse de Dino, who officiated as hostess at his table, and presided over his household. In 1807, at the conclusion of the campaign in Poland, Talleyrand, then Napoleon's Minister for Foreign Affairs, had obtained for his nephew, Edmond de Périgord, the hand of Dorothée, the daughter of the last reigning Duke of Courland. After a few years of married life, however, husband and wife agreed to live apart, and Madame Edmond from that time forward took up her residence with Talleyrand. She accompanied him to Vienna, in 1814, and brought back from the Congress the title of Duchesse de Dino. In return for the services he had rendered him, the King of Naples had conferred this dukedom upon Talleyrand, who had asked that the title might be assumed by his nephew. The duchess' position in Talleyrand's household was so generally recognized that, upon their arrival in London, King William IV., at Wellington's request, allowed her to take rank as an ambassadress.[28] The Comte Casimir de Montrond, another frequent guest at Valençay, and at the house in the Rue Saint-Florentin, followed the ambassador to London. Talleyrand's friendship with this curious individual appears to have begun under the Directory. In the terrible days which preceded the downfall of Robespierre, Montrond had been an inmate of the prison of Saint-Lazare. The fortunate possession of some ready money, a rare commodity at the time, had, however, enabled him to effect his escape, and that of the citizeness Franquetot, the heretofore Aimée de Coigny, Duchesse de Fleury, the heroine of André Chénier's poem.[29] After this miraculous deliverance, Aimée de Coigny, who under the emigration laws had divorced the Duc de Fleury, married the man to whom she owed her life. But, after a brief and most unsatisfactory experience of matrimony with the gay _incroyable_, she again contrived to obtain her freedom. Montrond's introduction to London society appears to date from the year 1812, when, having incurred the grave displeasure of Bonaparte, he succeeded in eluding the French police and in reaching England. He seems to have become very rapidly a well-known and popular member of the fashionable world in London. During all this period of his life he is believed to have been totally without regular means of subsistence, and to have existed solely by play, assisted by an occasional windfall in the shape of employment upon any secret political work which Talleyrand, when in favour, was enabled to procure for him. But from the earliest days of the Monarchy of July his circumstances began to improve. From this time forward he appears to have drawn a pension of about £1000 _per annum_ from the secret service funds of the French Foreign Office.[30] This allowance is said to have been granted him in order that "he should speak well