Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was born into a French aristocratic family at a time when this could not be said to be advisable. The French Revolution broke out in 1789, when Charles Maurice was thirty-five.

He had a bad fall when only four years old, and forfeited the right of inheritance. Cruel days indeed, but the Law was the Law. As so often happens in upper class families, finding himself virtually disinherited, he entered the Church, and rose rapidly through the ranks of the clergy, to become Bishop of Autun in March, 1789. Cleverly, he took the side of the revolutionaries in the States-General, and actually celebrated Mass at the notorious festival in the Champ de Mars on 14 July, 1789. This day has since then been celebrated by the French at home and abroad as ‘le quartorze de Juillet’.

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