annie

Steven Johnson, “chance favors the connected mind.”

The French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Napoleon’s foreign minister, was said to be so interesting, so charming, that it was almost dangerous to spend too much time in his company. Contemporaries described his smile as “paralyzing,” while the salonist Madame de Staël, no stranger to grandiloquence, gushed of Talleyrand, “If his ... See more