The first French Revolution probably affords as striking examples of change in worldly condition as any other period, and among those whom it affected for the time, few were more remarkable than two persons whom it sent to our own shores, Talleyrand and Chateaubriand. During the residence of the former in Philadelphia, he appears at one time to have been in the most abject poverty. We read of his pawning a watch and smaller articles, to provide himself and his companion with food; any care for their wardrobes, beyond the faded garments they were then wearing, being apparently out of the question. If one who then met the needy foreigner walking the wide streets of that respectable city, had predicted that in a few years this shabby Frenchman would be looked up to as the leader of the diplomacy of Europe, he might with perfect justice have been regarded as a fit subject for one of that city's excellent asylums. But a few years did witness this change, and saw him powerful and the possessor of millions; unfortunately for the Abbé's reputation, much of the latter being the wages of corruption.[C] Chateaubriand speaks feelingly of the sufferings he and his companion underwent in London, about the same period. Lodged in a dismal garret, they were at one time obliged to economize their food almost as closely as the inhabitants of a beleaguered town. He speaks of walking the streets for hours together, utterly uncertain what to do, passing stately houses and groups of blooming English children, and then returning late at night to his attic, where his companion, 'trembling with cold,' would rise from his ill-clad bed to open the door for him. He strikingly contrasts his position then with his approach to London twenty years later, as ambassador from France, driving in coach-and-four through towns whose authorities came out to welcome him in the usual pompous manner, and, while in London, giving magnificent balls in one of the stately houses, and perhaps numbering among his guests some of the blooming children he had once passed, now expanded into full-blown and gorgeous flowers of aristocracy. These are, of course, uncommon instances; but they teach that the most brilliant present may have had the darkest past; that there is always ground for hope, and that the caprices of fortune, if we take no higher view of them, are mysterious enough.