It is not probable that Talleyrand would have ventured again to live at Paris during those years. He _was_ an aristocrat, even if he clothed himself from head to foot in tricolour. He was a man of refined and humane temper, and could not possibly have co-operated further with the sanguinary parties that now came to power. At the most he would wish to retain a distant connection in the event of an improvement in the condition of Paris. A few days after reaching London, in accepting an invitation to Bowood, he wrote to Lord Lansdowne that “when one has passed the last two months at Paris one needs to come and refresh oneself with the conversation of superior people.” Then came news of the impeachment and trial of the King. London listened with growing horror and disgust to the details of the “trial.” On January 21st Louis was guillotined. On January 24th the late French ambassador, Chauvelin, the only official-looking Frenchman the Government could find, was swept out of England. On February 1st the Convention declared war against England and Holland (the one entanglement that endangered England’s neutrality). Talleyrand found the door which he had so cleverly contrived to leave open violently slammed upon him. He says in the memoirs that he did not intend to stay long in England. In fact, we know now that he applied about this time for permission to settle in Tuscany, but the Grand Duke had to refuse on the ground of his neutrality. The position must have been trying for a man of Talleyrand’s taste and ambition. If we may trust his later observations, his mind wandered unsteadily from one country to another and one occupation to another. He settled down, however, to the life of an emigrant in London, and managed to spend a year not unpleasantly. His library had been transferred to London,[25] and he spent his mornings in writing. He does not tell us the subject, but says that when he had returned to France a huge mass of his notes and memoranda came over from London. He would have us believe that they proved of little use for the writing of his memoirs, but the chapter on the Duc d’Orléans is so ample and circumstantial that it seems to have been written at an early date, and was not improbably written in 1793. It affords a thorough reply to the rumours, for which no documentary ground has ever been discovered by his most bitter enemies, that he was secretly working with the Orleanist group. He did not frequent the Palais Royal in a political capacity.