As soon as he arrived in Paris, Talleyrand joined the Constitutional Club, which used to meet at the Hôtel de Salm. Many thinking people saw the republic was gradually coming to an end, it had then but very little root in France. It was no longer possible to maintain a feeble and violent democracy, which gave way to the most fantastic and extraordinary paroxysms in the public assembly; people returned to the system of the balance of power, and to the English ideas that the school of Mounier and Lally-Tollendal had been desirous of rendering prevalent in the Constituent Assembly, and that Talleyrand had been commissioned to represent in London, in his secret mission, in which, as I before observed, there was mingled some idea of a revolution like that of 1688.
The institution of an executive directory had been the first step towards an oligarchic system, where, in default of an unity of power, a centre of action, reduced to five persons, had been established. Talleyrand applied all his credit to the support of the Directory, for, not being strong enough at that time to resist or to try to overturn the government, his only object was to draw some advantage from it. He refused steadily to join the royalist party, which, before the 18th Fructidor, was preparing the downfall of the Directory; still less would he belong to the Jacobin faction, for which he felt a strong antipathy, on account of its construction and its inclinations; accordingly, when the 18th Fructidor burst over France, with the proscription of the councils and the press, he was appointed to the ministry for foreign affairs; and the _Moniteur_ announced that citizen Talleyrand, devoted to the interests of the republic, was about to give a powerful impulse to our relations with foreign powers. To accept office under a republic was a singular employment for the heir of the Bosons of Périgord; but then was not the heir of the Barras, a family as old as the rocks of Provence, the chief of the five directors? A curious history might be written by following the career of the old nobility during the French revolution; they assumed the position that men of gentle blood had done in former times during civil disturbances, every thing adventurous suited the younger branches of a noble family.