172 ROSENGARTEN— MOREAU de SAINT MERY. [April 20, 



did not busy himself with poHtics. but at once began speculating in 

 land, then the great money-making business. The Scioto Company 

 was then all the vogue in Paris. The Holland Land Company was 

 buying right and left. LaForest, the French Consul General, had 

 bought an estate in Virginia in 1792. Noailles and Omer Talon in 

 association with Robert Morris had bought large tracts of land on 

 the Susquehanna for a colony of French royalist exiles, offering 

 land, which had cost them 15 sous an acre for 6 francs, as a refuge 

 from France. 



Talleyrand urged Mme. deStael and his friends in Europe to 

 send money for investment, and he proposed buying land in Maine 

 from General Knox. He told Moreau de St. Mery that he had a 

 plan for settling in Louisiana, and was a frequent visitor at St. 

 Mery's book store, meeting there his old friends and fellow exiles, — 

 Fayettists, Girondists, Constituents, Jacobins, Royalists, one of them, 

 Count de More, says '* wandering like ghosts, full of regrets, lost 

 hopes and disappointment over their shattered political careers." 



Mor.eau de St. Mery often spoke of the three days in 1789 when 

 as president of the Electoral College he was King of Paris. But 

 while the others were bewailing their hard fate, Moreau was busy 

 with his shop and his books, and Talleyrand wrote to Paris of 

 schemes for revictualling Paris, starved by the Reign of Terror, 

 crying for bread, by ships loaded with rice, grain and fish, named the 

 best merchants to deal with, and on the strength of his services, 

 secured the long-sought permission to return to France, and there 

 began that career of success which carried him safely through the 

 Republic, the Directory, the Empire, the Bourbon restoration and 

 into the reign of Louis Philippe. 



Other Frenchmen had planned a great French colony, — twenty- 

 four men, mostly young noblemen, had joined in forwarding Joel 

 Barlow's scheme of a great settlement on the Ohio, — the Scioto Com- 

 pany was organized, to buy 24,000 acres, — d'Epresmenil, their leader, 

 lost his life on the guillotine; Marnesia, after a tour through America, 

 returned to France, and with Lally Tollendal, Mounier and Malouet, 

 lost touch with their colony in the midst of the great events in their 

 own countrv. 



