The Duchess of Dino - Philip Ziegler

Dorothea Courland was intelligent, strikingly beautiful, proud to the point of arrogance, passionately loyal, a good friend and a relentless enemy. Usually her name is coupled with that of her uncle, Prince Talleyrand, and it was popularly assumed that he was the father of her last child. From the time that she went with him to the Congress of Vienna until his death more than twenty years later she was Talleyrand's most constant companion and support. When he came to London as Ambassador in 1830 it was she who acted as Ambassadress and increasingly took on herself the social and political burdens which he was too old and tired to bear alone. The last years of his life were dominated by her unceasing struggle to win him back to the Church of Rome. All her life Dorothea sought half-consciously for the perfect and complete relationship with other human beings which her love for her uncle could not altogether provide. She never got it and in the quest earned an international reputation as a loose and wicked woman. It is for the reader to decide whether this reputation was deserved.