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408 Autun. In 1802 Pius the Seventh, although he loved his excommunicated brother less than he will have it secularised him for his services to the Concordat. The Memoirs specially observe the tone of ecclesiastical decorum ; and once, addressing Louis the Eighteenth, Talleyrand is aghast at the incredulity of the age.

For a short time, when his Parisian rival, Narbonne, became Minister, he obtained considerable influence, and came to England early in 1792 on an acknowledged, but necessarily unofficial, mission, to ensure the neutrality of Pitt. In August he was again in Paris, and witnessed the overthrow of the monarchy. He induced Danton to send him back to London, under cover of some scientific negotiation, and was thus able to declare that he had not incurred the pains of emigration, and yet to assure Grenville that he was not in the service of the Republic. But with all his dexterity and coolness he could not hold a position between the upper and the nether millstone. He was outlawed in France, he was expelled from England ; and having sold his books in London, he sailed for Philadelphia. He would have been glad to get a passage to India, to be shrouded in sufficient obscurity until his time came.

It came at the end of two years. In 1796 he found himself restored to France, in the embarrassing company of a lady who had got Francis into trouble before him, and having no position but that of a member of the Institute. In the scheme for a national system of education, which he presented to the Assembly, the whole was to have been directed by a central board composed of the ablest men in France ; so that the idea of the Institute may be said to belong to him. The Duke de Broglie, following his father's Souvenirs, believes that Talleyrand's Report was not his own work ; while Jules Simon affirms the contrary, and the Memoirs claim that he drew it up after consulting Lavoisier, Laplace, and the scientific men of the day. In his new character he read two papers exposing the wisdom he had gathered in exile. During his two years' stay in England he had made a friend of Lord Lansdowne, and