But in spite of emigrant hatred and the general British hostility to France, he found a sufficiently large social circle in London. Mme. de Genlis had come to England with her niece. Talleyrand offered her a little money out of his small fund, and actually did assist other compatriots. Many of them were, as is known, living in bitter poverty. Mme. de Staël came over in January and remained until the summer. She took a house near Richmond, and Talleyrand spent a good deal of his time there. In Kensington the Countess de la Châtre kept a house, where many of Talleyrand’s old friends met. Narbonne had with difficulty got away—with the assistance of Mme. de Staël and Talleyrand—at the beginning of September. Rivarol and Lalley-Tollendal and many other constitutionalists were there. Fox and Sheridan and their friends afforded a fairly large circle of English acquaintances. Lord Lansdowne continued friendly long after he left England. At his house Talleyrand speaks of frequently meeting Hastings, Price, Priestley, Romilly, and Jeremy Bentham. His reputation for culture and conversation opened many doors. Sydney Smith was brought in contact with him somewhere, and says that he found him unequal to his reputation; but one imagines that Sydney Smith would not be unbiassed, and he admits he could not understand his French. The German physician, Bollmann, found him so charming that he “could listen to him for years.” On the whole, Talleyrand fared better than most of his indigent companions, though the enforced idleness annoyed him. “Patience and sleep,” he told Mme. de Staël, was his programme for the present. In another letter he described his chief occupations as “fishing and correcting proofs” (of Mme. de Flahaut’s novel). It is from the letters he wrote to Mme. de Staël after her return to France that we find he is still watching the situation in that country without despair. In one letter he sketches a plan. The southern provinces, which still show some attachment to the constitution, should unite, and invite the members of the old Constituent Assembly to meet at Toulon. He believes that the nation is still attached to the constitution, and that it is really in the supposed defence of this that they have risen against King and invaders. When he hears of the execution of the Queen he has to modify his view. “It is all over with the house of Bourbon in France,” he says; but he never believed that France would remain permanently republican. His wistful speculations, which were equally resented by republicans in France and royalists out of it (who charged the constitutionalists with bringing all his misfortunes on the King), were cut short at the beginning of 1794 by a peremptory order to quit England within five days (in another place Talleyrand says twenty-four hours). [Illustration: _From an engraving, after the picture by F. Gérard._ MADAME DE STAËL.]