French diplomat (1754-1838)
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (2 February 1754 – 17 May 1838), 1st Prince of Benevento, then Prince of Talleyrand, was a French clergyman and leading diplomat. After studying theology, he became Agent-General of the Clergy in 1780. In 1789, just before the French Revolution, he became Bishop of Autun. He worked at the highest levels of successive French governments, most commonly as foreign minister or in some other diplomatic capacity. His career spanned the regimes of Louis XVI, the years of the French Revolution, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Louis-Philippe. Those Talleyrand served often distrusted him but, like Napoleon, found him extremely useful. The name "Talleyrand" has become a byword for crafty, cynical diplomacy. Talleyrand polarizes scholarly opinion. Some regard him as one of the most versatile, skilled and influential diplomats in European history, and some believe that he was a traitor, betraying in turn the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Restoration.
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Whoever did not live in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and cannot imagine what happiness there can be in life. It is the century that forged all victorious weapons against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theater, Painting, Architecture, the Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Sciences, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical, intellectual and even moral appetites, to the refinement of all voluptuousness, all elegance and all pleasures. The existence was so full that if the seventeenth century was the Great Century of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion.
Celui qui n'a pas vécu au dix-huitième siècle avant la Révolution ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre et ne peut imaginer ce qu'il peut y avoir de bonheur dans la vie. C'est le siècle qui a forgé toutes les armes victorieuses contre cet insaisissable adversaire qu'on appelle l'ennui. L'Amour, la Poésie, la Musique, le Théâtre, la Peinture, l'Architecture, la Cour, les Salons, les Parcs et les Jardins, la Gastronomie, les Lettres, les Arts, les Sciences, tout concourait à la satisfaction des appétits physiques, intellectuels et même moraux, au raffinement de toutes les voluptés, de toutes les élégances et de tous les plaisirs. L'existence était si bien remplie qui si le dix-septième siècle a été le Grand Siècle des gloires, le dix-huitième a été celui des indigestions.