With that disregard for mere truthfulness in small matters which we notice throughout the memoirs (when there is a motive), he tells us that he kept aloof from politics, and only yielded after some refusals to the solicitations of Mme. de Staël. We know perfectly well that he was at the end of his purse, and was, if for no other reason, compelled to seek public service. He wrote to Mme. de Staël that he had only the means of subsistence for another month, and he would “blow his brains out if she did not find him a place.” He had then been in Paris more than six months, and saw no opening. Michaud says that he had left what little money remained to him (50,000 francs) in a bank at Hamburg. Castellane tells a curious story of his having left his silver in charge of a number of market-women when he left France, and says that he collected every bit of it when he returned in 1796. But he had now an establishment to keep up. The diplomatist had been smitten at last by an unexpected type of woman. When Madame Grand first met him, or first lived with him, it is quite impossible to determine. The more plausible authorities are contradictory, and the lady’s career has been as thickly encrusted with romance as that of Talleyrand. Her nationality is doubtful. Her father is generally believed to have been an Englishman, though some speak of him as a Dutch sailor, and others as a Breton. She was born in India, and her mother is said to have been a native. She was married, when young, to a Swiss, M. Grand, but he had divorced her when she had captivated no less a person than Sir Philip Francis. When Sir Philip returned to England, she came to Paris, and for some years we trace her indistinctly flitting between Paris, London and Hamburg. It may have been at Hamburg, but her German biographer thinks it was more probably at Paris, in 1797, that she met and captured Talleyrand.