friend, Chamfort, “your heart must break or bronze.” Talleyrand was not afflicted with a tender heart. His own house at Bellechasse soon became the centre of a brilliant circle of talkers. Though he rarely went to bed before three or four he was up early, and was joined by his friends over a cup of chocolate. He had a peculiarity in the heart-beat, to which he attributed his power of dispensing with sleep. He ate little—a cup of chocolate or a biscuit and glass of Madeira during the day, and a choice dinner in the evening. But his wine, his coffee, and his cook were carefully chosen, his toilet elaborately neat. One of the most cultured groups in the city used to gather at his house in the morning. Choiseul was the best of the group, and it is gratifying to find Talleyrand speaking of him in the later days with real affection. He was an animated talker and a good scholar, but he departed presently for the Embassy at Constantinople. Few of the others are spared in the terrible memoirs. He might have said with Chamfort, if he had deigned to borrow a phrase: “I have friends who love me, friends who don’t care a pin about me, and friends who detest me.” But their daily talks were one of the events of Parisian life. Most of them were, or became, Academicians. There was the boisterous young colonel, Count Louis de Narbonne, the third of the trinity, a hard military student, but jovial in company beyond the limit of taste. There was Colonel Lauzun (later Duc de Biron), who had begun his gallant adventures at seventeen, and contracted a debt of a million and a half by his thirty-fourth year; who often shot with the King, and boasted of the affection of the Queen. Later (when he came out of his third prison) there was young Mirabeau, “the tribune of the people,” with the huge, pock-marked face, and the sonorous denunciation of the social order that persecuted him. Of older men, there were the Abbé Delille, the chief poet of the time, friend of Voltaire, an _abbé commendataire_ (30,000 livres) with “the face of an infant,” the pen of a libertine, and the ideas of a philosopher: Chamfort, of the “electric head” (it bristled so with ideas), living now with the widow of Helvétius, pouring out vitriolic doses on humanity in all its aspects, but secretly writing Mirabeau’s and Talleyrand’s elevated democratic speeches—“How many fools does it take to make a public?” he used to ask: Count Lauraguais, very cultured and a generous patron of science and letters: Panchaud, the Swiss banker, greatly esteemed by Talleyrand, “the only man in France who could make the goose with the golden eggs lay without cutting its guts out,” said Mirabeau: Barthez, the doctor-philosopher, editor of the _Encyclopædia_: Ruehière, the young historian of Russia: Dupont de Nemours, the famous young economist. [Illustration: _From an engraving, after a picture by Retsch._ MADAME DE GENLIS.]