In this decision, Maury acted like another great scientist, Louis Pasteur who, when he was offered a professorship in Italy in 1871 during the Commune, would not leave France but said, “I should consider myself a criminal deserving a penalty for desertion if I left my country in her unhappiness to seek a better paid position than she can give me”. In March, 1862, Maury began to take a hand in the foreign affairs of the Confederacy. At this time he submitted to Colonel Orr, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, a paper setting forth the basis of a treaty with France. About a week later he wrote a long letter to Captain De Le Marche, Depot de la Marine, Paris, stating the commercial reasons why France ought to recognize the Confederacy; and these reasons were presented to President Davis for his consideration. In April, the French minister, accompanied by the Prussian envoy to the United States, came to Richmond under a flag of truce to pay in person his respects to Maury, and to deliver to him an invitation from Emperor Napoleon to come to France to reside. In view of this correspondence as well as many other letters which he wrote to influential people in both France and Great Britain, and because of the evidence of the high esteem for him that was shown by the Grand Duke Constantine and the Emperor Napoleon, it was natural that he came to be considered a suitable representative of the South in some foreign country. As early as April, 1862 he was approached with the offer of a mission to Europe to fit out armed cruisers; but time dragged on without the matter being brought to a conclusion. He repeatedly requested of Mallory some active service, as he did not wish to be a drone; and was told by the Secretary that he thought he would be of use doing nothing. In August, Mallory did at last offer him the command of a gunboat at Charleston, but this Maury declined as the vessel could not go to sea and was intended merely for harbor defense. Finally, in September, Maury was ordered to England on “special service”. That he was not pleased with this duty under the conditions according to which he was supposed to work is revealed in the following letter, which he wrote after the close of the war: “I was sent here really to be got out of the way, but nominally to superintend contracts with men of straw who could not pay their hotel bills but who had made pretended contracts with the Navy Department for about fifty million dollars and who never did anything. There was a great desire to have me in the Navy Department and Mallory was afraid he’d be turned out. Therefore he sent me here with hands tied, and what I did I took the responsibility a la Tennessee.”