Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/268

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248
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

funds, and was actually welcomed by the lady. His testimony, people supposed, was essential to her marriage with Talleyrand, insisted upon by Bonaparte, but Madame Grand had obtained in 1798 a divorce from Grand, for whom she procured a post at the Cape, where he died, virtually a British subject, in 1821. Lord Whitworth was strangely misinformed when, as a reason for his wife (the Duchess of Dorset) accepting Talleyrand's hospitality he wrote, "The lady who presides in his house bears his name, and is in fact married to him as far as the sanction of the Romish Church can make such a marriage lawful." No religious marriage had been or ever was allowed in Talleyrand's case. It was the civil marriage which was then impending.

Maria Edgeworth and her father were also in Paris, and had a singular adventure. After a four months' stay, devoted to literary pursuits, they were suddenly ordered to quit Paris in twenty-four hours and France in a fortnight. Edgeworth had been taken for a brother of the Abbé Edgeworth, Louis XVI.'s confessor and chaplain to the future Louis XVIII. On explaining that he was only a distant cousin, and had never seen him, the order was apparently revoked. Then there was Sir John Carr, whose trip to Paris formed the subject of the first of his many books of travel. Another embryo author was Colonel Thomas Thornton, who had a mind to see how French sport had been affected by