Word: talleyrand
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...were Gabriel Pascal, Somerset Maugham and Sir Max Beerbohm, and about these people he tells some of his most entertaining anecdotes. One day, 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 Recounting these incidents in an unpublished New Yorker profile of Pascal, Behrman wrote, "Whatever differences may have separated the Congress of Vienna, it was united on at least...
...firmer government than it had known in the preceding seven years. And in the process the stiff old soldier from Colombey-les-Deux Eglises had displayed precisely the two qualities his critics insisted that he lacked-a talent for conciliation and a mastery of political maneuver worthy of a Talleyrand or a Tammany sachem...
...idea of a battlemented castle." Destruction of his Walnut Wood would leave only one other of Davis' major Gothic mansions still standing and unaltered: Lyndhurst, the marble residence of the late Jay Gould in Tarrytown, N.Y., now owned by Gould's daughter, the Duchess of Talleyrand...
What qualities make a successful diplomat? Says Machiavelli: he must have "little regard for good faith and be able, by astuteness, to confuse men's brains and ultimately overcome those who have made loyalty their foundation." Says Talleyrand: "Above all, not too much zeal!" Says the U.S.'s John (Open Door) Hay, Secretary of State from 1898 to 1905: "There are three species of creatures who, when they seem coming are going, when they seem going, they come: diplomats, women and crabs...
...earnest tribute: "A woman's charm and attraction are more effective than force of arms. Ilouhi . . . played the part of a Talleyrand among the Moi's." In Jungle Mission (the English edition of Mission Speciale en Foret Moi, published by Editions France-Empire} Rene Riesen sets out to describe the guerrilla war in Viet Nam (1946-54), in which carnivo rous insects play almost as important a role as the cunning Viet Minh. There are exciting interludes in which elephants are hunted by day and tiger, buffalo, roebuck, boar and deer shot by flashlight at night...