"YOU are a coward, a traitor, and a thief." Purple veins stood out large on Napoleon's bull-neck as he concluded his tirade. "You have never worthily performed a single duty. You have betrayed and deceived everybody. You would sell your own father. You are a mess of dung in a silk stocking." The Emperor stopped, red-faced; he was out of breath. For half an hour Talleyrand had leaned, graceful and impassive, against a small table by the fire. Now he moved. Slowly, easily, he limped across the great carpet and paused at the white paneled doors. "What a pity," he remarked, "that such a great man should be so ill bred." Quietly he turned the knob, and disappeared down the long hall.

In 1758 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 of the champagne of life. M. Bernard de Lacombe has seen fit to describe him as the "chess player," calmly watching the whole turmoil of unrestrained human ambitions, toying in his delicate fingers the reins of Kingdom, Republic, and Empire.

When one considers these minute cameos with reference to Mr. Duff Cooper's production, he is led to suspect that the inspiration which fostered the writing of this book was very similar to that which would lead an elephant into a drawing room. The shoddy jacket blatantly insistent upon the 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.

Superficiality is occasionally relieved by a clever twist in the narration of witticisms. But the recurring 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 material; considered as biography, it loses all effectiveness in the morass of inexperience and slipshed, dull expression.