confidence in the affection of his subjects, seems to have preferred
taking the Bank of England as collateral security.

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