The only house which he visited with any particular freedom, besides that of his mother and that of Mme. de Genlis, was that of the Countess de Flahaut, at the Louvre. Governor Morris, the American Envoy, affirms that he found Talleyrand helping to give her a foot-bath there one morning. Her son, born in 1785, was pretty generally accredited to Talleyrand, but in an age of myths and scandals exact determination is as difficult as it is superfluous. He shared the celebrated dinners of Mme. de Reynière, saw the deistic Abbé Delille dine with the Queen at Mme. de Polignac’s, and went to “learned and tiresome concerts” at Mme. Lebrun’s (the artist), M. d’Albaret’s, and the Count de la Rochechouart’s. It must not be supposed that he was merely tolerated in these circles. He was sought and esteemed. It is said that he was generally one of the last to enter a salon, limping slightly, faultlessly dressed in blue coat and white vest and chamois breeches (unless it were advisable to remember the soutane), and there was an appreciable movement towards him. His biting wit and quick repartee soon forced people to reckon with him. One never knew when his deep, deliberate voice would break in with effect. “I don’t know why people don’t like me,” one man was saying; “I have only done one wrong thing in my life.” “When will it be over?” asked Talleyrand. “Sieyès is deep,” said another to him. “You mean hollow,” he at once replied. A lady once asked him, in a period of difficulty, how his affairs were going. One version has it that she asked how his legs were. “As you see, madame,” he suavely answered. The lady squinted. His liberal ideas were, of course, an advantage. “He dresses like a fop, thinks like a deist, and preaches like an angel,” said someone; though we have no trace whatever of his ever delivering sermons. But it was the age of the philosophers. Talleyrand disliked the more consistent and more advanced of them, such as Condillac, Hélvetius, d’Holbach, and the Abbé Raynal, because they not only destroyed superstition, but “broke the links of the moral and social order”—such as it was. But this was written twenty years afterwards. He was never caught by the charlatanry of Jean-Jacques. He greatly esteemed Voltaire, and took care to be presented to him when he came to Paris and was fêted to death in 1778. The myth-makers of later years describe how he went on his knees for the aged philosopher’s blessing.