Catherine Grand
Catherine Noël Grand was the mistress and later the wife of French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the first Prime Minister of France. From their marriage in 1802 until her death she was Catherine Noël Grand de Talleyrand-Périgord, Princesse de Bénévent. Madame Grand was known for her striking Nordic beauty, as well as her ingenuous public comments.Life
Catherine Noël Worlée was born in the Danish possession of Tranquebar, Tamil Nadu, India, to a French colonial official stationed at nearby Pondicherry. In 1777, her family moved to Chandannagar, where she met George François Grand, a British civil servant of French-Swiss Huguenot descent stationed at Calcutta. They were wed in Chandannagar in 1778, when Catherine was barely sixteen.
The couple separated soon after, because of her brief but scandalous affair with Sir Philip Francis, deputy of Warren Hastings, and Madame Grand removed to London. By 1783, when Vigee Le Brun painted her portrait there, Catherine Grand had become a courtesan in Paris; she returned to Britain just before the French Revolution in 1789 and back to Paris before 1791. She served as Mistress to Claude Antoine de Valdec de Lessart, :fr:François-Auguste Fauveau de Frénilly and others.
In 1794, Mme. Grand attracted the attention of French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, with whom she lived as mistress exclusively from 1797 until 1802, when Napoleon Bonaparte pressed Talleyrand to marry her. After marriage the two gradually drifted apart. Madame Talleyrand began living alone, pursuing relationships with the Duke of San Carlos her husband eventually giving her enough money to live luxuriously in London and finally divorcing after Talleyrand entered into an arrangement with Dorothea von Biron, the wife of his nephew, the Duke of Dino.
In the last few years of her life, the Princesse de Bénévent returned to Paris. She died there on December 10, 1834, and her body was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
