A singular contribution to Talleyrand’s history occurs in “Men and Times of the Revolution,” by Elkanah Watson (New York, 1856, pp. 387, 388). It will serve to refute the notion that he had any particular mission. “In the years 1794 and 1795, I resided in the northern suburbs of Albany, known as the Colonie. Monsr. Le Contaulx, formerly of Paris, a very amiable man, was my opposite neighbour. His residence was the resort of the French emigrants. During that period, Count Latour Dupin, a distinguished French noble, made a hair-breadth escape from Bordeaux with his elegant and accomplished wife, the daughter of Count Dillon. They were concealed in that city for six terrible weeks, during the sanguinary atrocities of Tallien, and arrived at Boston with two trunks of fine towels, containing several hundred in each, the only property they had been able to save from the wreck of an immense estate.… They purchased a little farm upon an eminence nearly opposite Troy. Here they were joined by Talleyrand, who had arrived about the same time in Albany, also an exile and in want. I became intimate with them.… They avowed their poverty, and resided together on the little farm, suffering severe privations, bringing to Albany the surplus produce of their land, and habitually stopping, with their butter and eggs, at my door. They yielded with a good grace to their humiliating condition. In the year following, I was surrounded in my office by a group of distinguished Frenchmen; the Count, Talleyrand, Volney, the philosophical writer and traveller, Mons. Pharoux, … and Desjardins, a former Chamberlain of Louis XVI.” This intercourse at length terminated, through the avowed dislike of the _émigrés_ to American institutions, habits, and customs. CHAPTER V. “HEARING MY COUNTRY ATTACKED, I BECAME HER DEFENDER THROUGH THICK AND THIN.” Nearly two years had elapsed, before Cobbett’s life was disturbed by any greater excitement than would be furnished by his daily pursuits as a teacher of the French language. Even in Philadelphia, where party spirit was strong, and antipathy to England was particularly manifest, a busy, hard-working man, with his bread to earn, and who had no natural taste for politics, had no need to interfere--and Cobbett would not have interfered, probably, had not the occasion been brought about almost by accident. The little republicanism which had leavened his mind, whilst in London, had disappeared, when he came to see more of human nature in his new country; and the municipal contests, and the flaring speeches and writings, which excited less industrious minds, had no charm for him. “Newspapers,” he says, “were a luxury for which I had little relish, and which, if I had been ever so fond of, I had not time to enjoy.” But a circumstance occurred, about the middle of the year 1794, which aroused Cobbett’s native spirit; and offered, at the same time, an opportunity for its exercise:--