During the summer of 1794 Talleyrand visited the United States.  He brought a package from Mrs. Church to Mrs. Hamilton, and a cordial letter from the same important source to the statesman whom he ranked higher than any man of his time.  “He improves upon acquaintance,” wrote Mrs. Church to her sister; “I regret that you do not speak French.”  But her sister’s husband spoke French better than any man in America, and after the resignation from the Cabinet, Talleyrand spent most of his time in the little red brick house at 26 Broadway, where Hamilton was working to recover his lost position at the bar.  “I have seen the eighth wonder of the world,” wrote the Frenchman, one morning, after a ramble in the small hours, which had taken him past the light in Hamilton’s study, “I have seen the man who has made the fortune of a nation, toiling all night to supply his family with bread.”  The men found great delight in each other’s society.  Hamilton was the most accomplished and versatile man in America, the most brilliant of conversationists, the most genial of companions, and hospitable of hosts.  Talleyrand epitomized Europe to him; and the French statesman had met no one in his crowded life who knew it better.  If he gave to Hamilton the concentrated essence of all that ardent brain had read and dreamed of, of all that fate had decreed he never should see in the mass, Talleyrand placed on record his tribute to Hamilton’s unmortal powers of divination, and loved and regretted him to the close of his life.

Different as the men were in character, they had two points in common,—­a passionate patriotism, and the memory of high ideals.  Public life had disposed of Talleyrand’s ideals, and Hamilton, after an education in the weakness and wickedness of human nature which left nothing to be desired, would have been equally destitute, had it not been for his temperamental gaiety and buoyant philosophy.  There were times when these deserted him, and he brooded in rayless depths, but his Celtic inheritance and the vastness of his intellect saved him from despair until the end.  Talleyrand was by no means an uncheerful soul; but his genius, remarkable as it was, flowed between narrower lines, and was unwatered by that humanity which was Hamilton’s in such volume.  Both men had that faculty of seeing things exactly as they are, which the shallow call cynicism; and those lost conversations appeal to the imagination of the searcher after truth.

Jay’s treaty was the most formidable question with which Hamilton was called upon to deal before the retirement of Washington to private life, and it gave him little less trouble than if he had remained in the Cabinet.