George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[113] etc., etc., all of which is false, and only intended to let the public come gradually at the truth. However, Confalonieri arrived here on the 5th instant, and on the 9th it was finally admitted, by the government journals, that there was no longer any objection to his being in Paris. December 11.—I dined to-day at Mr. Harris's,¹ where were General Cass, our Minister, Prince Czartoriyski, formerly Prime Minister of Alexander of Russia, General Lallemand, and a few others. But the person who most interested me was Baron Pichon.² I sat next to him at dinner, and talked with him afterwards till half past 10 o'clock, long after the rest of the company was gone. He was Secretary of Legation to Genet and Fauchet in the United States; afterwards in the office of Foreign Affairs here, during the Directory and under Talleyrand; then again in the United States, Secretary and Charge d'affaires from 1801 to 1805, and I know not what else, until he was Governor of Algiers under Louis Philippe, to whom he is now Conseiller d'etat. Among other things he told me that Tom Paine, who lived in Monroe's house at Paris, had a great deal too much influence over Monroe; that Monroe's insinuations and representations of General Pinckney's character, as an aristocrat, prevented his reception as Minister by the Directory, and that, in general, Monroe, with whose negotiations and affairs Pichon was specially charged, acted as a party-democrat against the interests of General Washington's administration, and against what Pichon considered the interests of the United States. Of Burr, he said that he was the most unprincipled man he had almost ever known, and that he hardly knew how he could have become so, to such a degree, in the United States. He said that between 1801 and 1805, while Burr was Vice-President of the United States, he made suggestions and proposals to Pichon, for throwing the United States into confusion, and separating the States under the influence and with the aid of France; and that when Burr was in France afterwards, he renewed the same offers and suggestions, both to Talleyrand and to Bonaparte. Of Hamilton he spoke with great praise and admiration; but said he must qualify it somewhat, because Hamilton once said to him that Talleyrand was the greatest of modem statesmen, because he had so well known when it was necessary both to suffer wrong to be done and to do it. Talleyrand, he said, who had been the entire cause of