One better feature of the time was that the powerful Mirabeau was becoming alarmed. When he had whispered to the President of the Assembly on October 5th that “Paris is marching on us,” he had been told that it was “so much the better; we shall get a Republic all the sooner.” Talleyrand and he and other constitutionalists met at the “Society of Friends of the Constitution,” the successor of the Breton Club, meeting now in the library of the Jacobin convent in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Its debates were then quiet and orderly, the general public not being admitted. Most of the abler moderates met there—Duport, Barnave, Lameth (the well-known triumvirate—“triumscroundrelate,” Mirabeau said later), Sieyès, Chapelier, the Duc d’Aiguillon, &c. Many non-deputies, especially writers, were admitted after the transfer to Paris, and the club became a lively centre of journalism and pamphleteering. Gradually it became infected with the general violence of the time, and Talleyrand and the moderates left it in May to found the more respectable club of the Feuillants, with La Fayette, Bailly, Sieyès, Chamfort, and Marmontel. But Paris was being rapidly denuded of all that appealed to Talleyrand. By the middle of October there were 60,000 émigrés in Switzerland alone. The society that replaced them must have tried Talleyrand’s infinite restraint. One of Napoleon’s rough marshals said of him that “you could attack him thirty times in the rear (_coups de derrière_) before any indication appeared on his face.” He needed that quality most of all in the days of the Revolution. During the remainder of 1789 he confined himself to practical work and moderation. On November 7th he appeared in the tribune to appeal for the proper protection of the confiscated estates. Towards the close of the month he was appointed on the bank committee, and he delivered its report on December 4th—a very able, technical discourse on the bank question, directed to be published by the Assembly. In December he helped to carry the abolition of the royal lottery, and in January he still further embittered his former friends of the Right by securing the enfranchisement of the Jews in the south. We have also speeches of his pleading for a uniform standard of weights and measures in the country (of which he afterwards sent a copy to Sir J. R. Miller, who was urging the cause in England), and on registration fees and the coinage of small money.