It was now more needful than ever to secure an appointment.[27] Mme. de Staël lent Talleyrand 24,000 francs, and promised to use her influence on the Directorate. Lytton connects Talleyrand’s appointment with the reading of his papers at the Institut. Two of the Directors, Rewbell and Reveillère belonged to it, and possibly heard his second paper on July 13th. These were the most decent members of the group of five which then ruled France, and it is natural that they should appreciate Talleyrand’s worth to the country. But Mme. de Staël won over the most important of the five, Barras, and induced him to invite Talleyrand to dine at his house at Suresnes. The other four lived with their families in a modest and respectable fashion under the eyes of the people at the Luxembourg. Barras, an aristocrat by birth, but coarse, violent, and sensual, made a good deal of money by secret commissions, and kept a lively establishment at Suresnes, besides the apartments at the Luxembourg where Mme. Tallien presided. An accident afforded a good opportunity to Talleyrand. Whilst he waited at Barras’ house the latter’s aide-de-camp, a youth to whom he was greatly attached, was drowned in the river, and it fell to Talleyrand to console the very distressed Director. He made a useful impression on Barras; in fact that functionary some time later paid him the awkward compliment of saying that his ways “would sweeten a dung-hill.” There was a change in the Ministry soon afterwards, and Barras warmly presented Talleyrand for foreign affairs. Rewbell and Reveillère supported him. Carnot opposed everything that Barras proposed, and Barthélemy followed Carnot. But the three carried the nomination. That night at ten o’clock Talleyrand was called out of the Salon des Étrangers by a gens-d’arme. He brought an official notification signed by Carnot. Talleyrand foolishly wastes a paragraph or two in explaining several reasons why he felt bound to accept. One would like him better it he had devoted them to a grateful acknowledgment of the help given him by Mme. de Staël. But she seems to have bored him a good deal, and in any case they had separated before these pages were written. “She has only one defect,” he once said: “She is insufferable.”