Word: talleyrand
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...whose reappearance is sometimes anticlimactic. From France to Italy to Cuba to Africa to Europe again the story goes, then heads west to Louisiana and loses itself among the deserts and mountains of Mexico. Spanning the Napoleonic period, it introduces many a historical personage in human guise: Napoleon himself, Talleyrand, Slaver Mongo Tom, the Rothschilds (né Meyer). Though this lavish scene forms only the background for the hero, he is the least "real" (i. e., objectified) person in the book. A picaresque Everyman, he wanders the world searching for his soul, finally finds it; but most readers will...
...Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, aged four, slipped off a chest of drawers, broke his foot, and thereby forfeited all claim to military training and parental affection. But if a sickly cripple could not wield a saber, he could at least study the scriptures, and Maurice, aged thirteen, was consigned to the ecclesiastical limbo. Twenty years later he wore the Miter of Autun. Thence for sixty odd years the imperturbable Talleyrand stood at the right elbow of every government that held sway in Paris. Through the maze of diplomacy and intrigue he walked, smiling ironically, drinking deeply and often...
...literary value of sex and gambling is, of course, designedly misleading. But there is little relief between the covers. In his three hundred and fifty pages, Mr. Cooper apparently sets out to give a history of France over a period of eighty years, and to place incidental emphasis on Talleyrand. In attempting to straddle the two, the book falls into the vague, unsatisfactory mists between them. One has a picture of Mr. Cooper's typewriter firmly sandwiched between the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the one side, and an anecdotal card index on the other...
...lapses into distasteful English, the omission of significant detail, a complete lack of spontaneity, and lengthy debate as to the relative merits of secondary sources are inexcusable. When Mr. Cooper states that "Danton did not attain even to the Tammany definition of an honest man," when he asserts that Talleyrand "took no open part" in the controversy of the Three Estates of 1789, when he commits the flagrant sin of perpetrating anti-climactic epigrams, it is time to call a halt...
According to records, this is Mr. Cooper's first attempt at biography. And if this necessitates any mitigation of rigor, let it be said that in a superficial way the picture of Vienna in 1815 is accurate and at times interesting, and that during the last fifty pages, when Talleyrand and Mr. Cooper are relieved of the political onus, the pictures and phrasing acquire a new freshness. But to all save the most causal reader, this latest plunge into the mystery of Talleyrand is worthless; considered as an historical document, it offers practically nothing save a superficial rehash of secondary...