Talleyrand settled in the United States, and during some years he devoted himself to commerce, and engaged in speculations with a considerable degree of activity. There always was something adventurous and bold in his disposition in money matters; to use a familiar expression, no one ever made his fortune oftener than M. de Talleyrand, without being particularly scrupulous as to the means he employed. His property in France was sequestered, it was, therefore, with very limited funds that he commenced his mercantile operations in the United States; and it was certainly singular enough to see a bishop of 1789, afterwards a popular orator, then a secret diplomatist acting as a spy for a party of the National Assembly, finally transforming himself into a merchant in a counting-house at Boston or New York. The shades of the ancient Bosons of Périgord, those great feudal barons, must have been horrified and have indignantly grasped their lances and their coats of arms when they contemplated their descendant seated amid bales of cotton in a republic of shopkeepers. In this manner do revolutions take hold of a man's destiny, play with it, and raise and abase it by turns; but the nobility had already accustomed France to still more extraordinary courses: had not men of noble birth in Brittany and Gascony become freebooters and buccaneers under Henry IV., Louis XIII., and Louis XIV.? A commercial profession in a country so distant from important events did not suit Talleyrand's inclination, and when order was a little restored, he lost no time in soliciting permission to return to France, the scene of his earliest days. He had left many friends there, among the partisans of what was called the moderate republic and constitutional system; such were Chenier and Madame de Staël, belonging to the literary and philosophical portion of society under the Directory, who had regained some degree of importance after the Reign of Terror was past, for in calmer times the different shades of a party become more evident.