Word: metternichs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pascal--the Hungarian producer who procured the screen rights to all of Bernard Shaw's plays--said to Behrman, "Sahm, you know I ahm illegitimate descendant Talleyrand." Two weeks later, Behrman met Pascal again and the producer said, "Sahm, did I tell you I ahm illegitimate descendant Metternich?" Recounting these incidents in an unpublished New Yorker profile of Pascal, Behrman wrote, "Whatever differences may have separated the Congress of Vienna, it was united on at least one thing: to have some share, however remote, in Pascal's paternity." Pascal's coment on reading the profile was: "There is thin line...
...really was, French Historian Jean Savant went on the principle that no man is a hero to his valet. He rounded up eyewitness accounts of valets and those Napoleon treated as valets: mistresses, bodyguards and generals, tailors, aides-de-camp, and such luminaries of the age as Goethe and Metternich. Out of the intimate, often lurid documentation emerges no hero but a devastating closeup of the man who convinced Frenchmen they were a race of heroes, and split nations apart like ripe fruit to show that "given 500,000 men, one can do anything...
...Napoleon known to history emerged with incredible rapidity. The small figure in his green chasseur's uniform and white waistcoat and breeches became a kind of miniature god of war who presided over incredible carnage without blinking. After the defeat at Moscow. Napoleon told Austria's Metternich: "The French can't complain of me. To spare them. I've sacrificed Germans and Poles. I lost 300,000 men, but only 30,000 were French." Retorted Metternich sharply: "You forget, Sire, that you are speaking to a German...
...days of ruffled-shirt diplomacy, when Talleyrand and Prince Metternich were in 19th century flower, a diplomat needed a backstairs source in the palace, a talent for intrigue and a good cook. Big powers acted in concert, and the small powers were expected to know their place. The financial side of diplomacy was a relatively simple matter of buying allies or buying off potential enemies. In mid-20th century diplomacy, financial dealings must be disguised under such inoffensive names as mutual assistance, economic cooperation or foreign aid, and economic aid has increasingly become regarded as a debt that rich nations...
...Catholic peasant forebears with some of the acquired awareness (and tinsel knowledge) of Viennese sophisticates. In his well-tailored morning coat, he still looks the farmer, and he seems quite out of place as he sits in his lavish offices in Vienna's Ballhausplatz, under a portrait of Metternich, who manipulated Europe from the same chamber. Yet somehow Figl is not out of place: he knows little of crafty diplomacy but has, in the words of a friend, the nerves of a draft horse...