it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand:
No one now remembers Duff Cooper, but in Great Britain in the l930s, and in the years of the Second World War, everyone who paid attention to what Winston Churchill was trying to do knew Duff Cooper’s name. Alfred Duff Cooper was part of the English aristocracy that in 1890 when he was born still considered itself to have not just the right to rule, but the duty to prepare itself for the task. Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, attended Eton and Oxford, and was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1924. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1938, but resigned when Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler. When the war broke out, and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister, he asked Cooper to become Minister of Information, a position he retained until 1944 when he became England’s ambassador to France. Cooper knew more about France than many of the public officials with whom he was to deal, and, more importantly, understood the precise relationship that needed to exist between England and France if the peace of Europe was to be maintained. He had written about it before the war, in l932, in his remarkable biography of one of the greatest, and most misunderstood, statesmen the world has ever seen.Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
Born in 1754 into the French aristocracy, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord was treated like most of the children of his class: he was ignored by his parents and sent at the age of eight to boarding school, to college, where he spent most of his time in the library, “reading works of history and biographies of statesmen, feeding his hopes for the future upon the record of the past.” Trading one monastic life for another, he was ordained a priest in 1779. This then was not really a monastic life at all. If Talleyrand ever prayed, it was for the swift departure of anyone who failed to keep up their end of a dinner table conversation. Talleyrand could talk, and to “talk well was then considered the highest attribute that any person could possess,” and the “great ladies were the leaders of talk as well as of fashion.” Though not especially attractive, women, even those who thought they would hate him, fell easily, sometimes too easily, under his spell.
In 1788 Talleyrand became the Bishop of Autun, and at the age of thirty-five was one of the most important men in Paris. He soon had a reputation for seduction so great that in “an age of universal latitude and easily condoned license,” he “acquired notoriety even before he acquired fame.” Cooper sums it up: “Noble birth, influential connections, and a powerful intelligence, supported by high ambition and unburdened by scruples,” he seemed destined to become “a worthy successor to the great ecclesiastical statesmen who in the past had controlled the destiny of France.” He had already made one important contribution to the destiny of France: he was the father, the unacknowledged father, of the great French painter Delacroix.
History has a way of changing its meaning. July 14th, Bastille Day, is celebrated in France the way July 4, Independence Day, is celebrated in the United States, the beginning of self-government, freedom from the oppressive rule of monarchs and aristocracies. No one who lived through the French Revolution would have been quite so convinced that the Revolution, and the Terror which followed, had been something worth celebrating. When it happened, when the Revolution suddenly erupted, Talleyrand had two choices: leave France — emigrate, as most of the nobility did — or give his wholehearted support to what the Revolution was trying to accomplish. Talleyrand refused to leave, and such were his powers of persuasion, such was the force of his mere presence, that in February 1790, he was elected President of the Assembly. Like nearly everyone else who played a prominent part in the early days of the Revolution, Talleyrand was soon under threat of the guillotine for not going as far as the Jacobins demanded. He had nowhere to turn, “ruined in pocket, tarnished in reputation, with nothing to hope for from the victorious Revolutionaries, and even less from the defeated Bourbons.” He sailed to America, where he spent the next two years and became friends with Alexander Hamilton.
Cooper says every little about this relationship, but it tells us more than anything else could about what made Talleyrand so often seem irreplaceable. Talleyrand, as has already been noted, could carry on a conversation better than anyone else. Even on first meeting, he seemed to those who met him more intelligent, more deeply instructed, than anyone they had known before. It is not difficult to understand. Listen to all the music you like, when you hear for the first time something by Mozart or Beethoven, you begin to have an idea what a revelation it must have been for someone who suddenly found himself in the presence of a master of the spoken word. And Talleyrand, it should be mentioned, had something like the same impression of Hamilton. Years later, when he was the French Foreign Minister under Napoleon, he kept a portrait of Hamilton on the wall behind his desk. When Aaron Burr, who had killed Hamilton in a duel, came to visit him in Paris, Talleyrand refused to see him.
After the Terror had run its course, after the guillotine had finished with its gruesome work, the Directory took control of France, and from November of 1795 to November of 1799 did everything it could to protect those who had profited from the Revolution, those who feared, on the one hand, that the Bourbons might return, and, on the other, that a new revolution would bring about a redistribution of property “and the submersion of those particular revolutionaries whom chance, and no other conceivable agency, had recently thrown to the top of the melting pot.” Talleyrand came back to Paris in September of 1797; eight months later he was Minister for Foreign Affairs. He quickly made his fortune. There had been a reaction from the “gloom and misery” produced by the Revolution, “an outburst of enjoyment which took the form of almost frenzied revels and unbridled license.” It was an “age of corruption,” in which every transaction came with a cost, an expense, in other words, a bribe. Because Talleyrand took millions, while others took thousands, he “became an object of obloquy.” He did not mind; there were so many other things he had to do. The government, for example, was, as he quickly realized, too weak to survive. Something had to be done. He began a regular correspondence with the army general whose success in Italy had begun to attract attention; he became friends with Napoleon, and the Directory, unable to govern, was easily dismissed.
Cooper’s explanation of why this happened is an unusually insightful diagnosis, not just of what happened then, but what has often happened since: “as is usually the case when democratic institutions are failing, the general demand among all classes and in all parties was for one strong man who would sweep away all the politicians, who would not pander to the ephemeral powers that were, but would give good government to the majority, who wanted it, and impose firm government upon the few, who did not. Talleyrand, ever sensitive to popular opinion, and gifted with a power of perception that could penetrate the future further than most, was aware of this widespread desire, and was determined to satisfy it.”
Napoleon, only thirty years of age, was “ignorant, anxious to learn, and not ashamed to be taught. The wisest and best liked of his tutors was Talleyrand.” The four years of the Consulate were, in Cooper’s judgment, one of the two most “glorious periods of French history, the reign of Henry IV being the other.” Napoleon’s work was “the reconstruction of France and the pacification of Europe.” The pinnacle of his achievement was the Treaty of Amiens of 1801 which brought peace with England. “If Napoleon had at this moment been capable of moderating his thirst for dominance the history of the world would have been altered.” Talleyrand understood this and tried in vain to change the way Napoleon thought about the future. Napoleon, Talleyrand learned, allowed nothing “but the adversity of fortune to limit the scope of his ambition.” Two years later, the war with England began again. Convinced that Napoleon was a danger to both France and Europe, Talleyrand began to work for his downfall.That meant treason, but not treason to France. With rare intelligence, and rare courage, Talleyrand understood the difference and was willing to act on what he knew.
When Czar Alexander and Napoleon met at the conference of Erfurt to discuss whether Russia would support Napoleon in a war against Austria, Talleyrand did not hesitate to tell Alexander that it was not in his interest to do so. “Sire,” he told him in private, “it is in your power to save Europe, and you will only do so by refusing to give way to Napoleon. The French people,” he insisted, “are civilized, their sovereign is not. The sovereign of Russia is civilized and his people are not: the sovereign of Russia should therefore be the ally of the French people.” The Czar took advantage of advice from the French Foreign Minister and gave him information about the proposals Napoleon had made each day. “This was treachery,” Cooper acknowledges, “but it was treachery upon a magnificent scale. Of the two Emperors, upon whose words the fate of Europe depended, Talleyrand had made one his dupe and the other his informant.”
Talleyrand knew exactly what had to be done. The future of France, and more even than that, the future of Europe, depended upon the continued independence of England. He was convinced that “the liberalizing anti-autocratic spirit of England was necessary in order to maintain the mental equilibrium of the Continent, and prevent the violence of reaction, provoked by the violence of revolution, from going too far in the opposite direction. ‘Get this through your head,’ he once exclaimed to Madame de Remusat, ‘if the English Constitution is destroyed, the civilization of the world will be shaken to its foundations.’”
Talleyrand’s loyalty was to France; Napoleon’s loyalty was to himself. On January 23, 1808, at a special meeting of the privy council, Napoleon began with a few remarks to the effect that “his ministers had no right even to think for themselves, far less to give their thoughts expression. To doubt was for them the beginning of treason, to differ from him was the crime itself.” He then turned to Talleyrand and for “one solid half-hour, without interruption” attacked him for every crime imaginable. Shaking his fist at him, he told him he “was nothing but so much dung in a silk stocking.” Talleyrand never so much as changed expression; never so much as indicated an awareness he was being addressed. When it was over, when the meeting broke up, he turned to one of those who had witnessed this unprecedented torrent of abuse and remarked drily, “What a pity such a great man should be so ill-bred!” The next day, it was as if it had never happened. Napoleon had come to hate him, distrust him, but still could not do without him.
The Czar would not help with Austria, and with an army of half a million men, Napoleon invaded Russia. Talleyrand knew this was the beginning of the end. When Napoleon was banished and the monarchy restored, it was a government that, thanks to Talleyrand, was government on the English model. He was convinced, and for a while convinced the country, that the world had changed, that supreme power could only be exercised with the “consent of bodies drawn from the heart of the country that it governs.” Legitimacy, the Divine Right of Kings, had been based on, and received its support from, religion, but religion had lost its power.
France was free of Napoleon, but it was a conquered country. The four victorious Powers — England, Russia, Prussia and Austria — met at the Congress of Vienna to decide what France would have to pay. Instead, representing a vanquished nation, Talleyrand, “by the charm of his mind and the ascendancy of his genius,” dominated the proceedings. From “being the representative of the one Power which Europe had united to conquer he became at a turn of the wheel the determining factor in the future settlement.” He did more than that. He negotiated a secret treaty in which England, Austria and France agreed to maintain the peace and the existing borders. France was safe.
Talleyrand, sixty years of age, retired from active pubic life and lived with his niece by marriage, a beautiful young woman of twenty-four. In l820, his niece had a “somewhat ostentatious reconciliation” with her husband and bore him a third child, Pauline. The “true parentage was generally attributed to Talleyrand.” A year later, in 1821, Napoleon died. “What an event!” someone declared. Talleyrand rejoined, “It is only a piece of news.” He later explained his real feelings about Napoleon. “I served him so long as I could believe that he himself was completely devoted to France. But when I saw the beginning of those revolutionary enterprises which ruined him I left the ministry, for which he never forgave me.” Nine years later, in 1830, Talleyrand, who was now seventy-seven, became the French ambassador to England, the country whose government he always thought the best model for France. He had no illusions about what the world thought of him, and no doubt about what he thought of himself. “I am thought immoral and machiavellian, I am only calm and disdainful….I have braved the stupidity of public opinion all my life….”
It is hard to find fault with Duff Cooper’s judgment that Talleyrand “was a true patriot and a wise statesman, to whom neither contemporaries nor posterity has done him justice.” Duff Cooper’s biography goes far to right the balance.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams.
--Marshal Zeringue
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