Whether Talleyrand despaired of obtaining permission to return he does not say, but he tells us that in the autumn of 1795 he and his friend Beaumetz invested their small capital in stocking a ship for the East Indies. They had seen the first American adventurers return from India in 1794 with rich spoils, and seem to have caught the Indian fever that then broke out in America. They were joined by a number of Philadelphia firms, and their ship was about to start when the Fates intervened. How the biography of Talleyrand would have run if this adventure had been permitted it is difficult to conjecture. In fact, the whole story has a most undeniable odour of legend about it, but, apart from a few details (such as that of Beaumetz attempting to murder him in New York) which the romanticists add on their own authority, it is Talleyrand himself who tells it, in the memoirs. I am not quite sure that this puts it beyond dispute, but probably we should admit it, and see in it a proof of the most unusually restless and irritated temper he had fallen into in America. However, his petition had succeeded at Paris. Mme. de Staël, who was sincerely devoted to him, induced Legendre and Boissy d’Anglas to favour the petition. It was presented to the Convention on September 4th, and supported by M. J. Chénier and the ex-Oratorian, Daunou. Talleyrand’s name was erased from the list of _émigrés_, and he was described as an unappreciated patriot. He had struck the right note in alluding to “the tyranny of Robespierre.” The various sections of the Terrorists had annihilated each other in mutual distrust; and more peaceful, if not quite more admirable, elements had come to power. In the summer of 1795 the Jacobin Club was closed, and the once terrible name was now laughingly hurled at one as “Jacoquin.” Sanculottist Paris had risen in insurrection twice, and had twice been chased back into its slums. Chénier had only to describe Talleyrand as a victim of the persecutions of Marat and Robespierre, and “the perfidy of Pitt,” and one whose “noble conduct as a priest and man had greatly promoted the Revolution,” and his name was struck off the black list. He let Beaumetz sail alone for India, bade farewell to Hamilton and la for Rochefoucauld and his many friends in the States, and sailed for Europe in a Danish vessel in November. He had not been thirty (as he says), but twenty, months in America. It had seemed longer.[26] CHAPTER VIII THE REGENERATED PARIS