Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Duff Cooper’s "Talleyrand"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

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.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand. It begins:

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.

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:...[read on]

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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; Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand.

--Marshal Zeringue