Dangerous Liaisons: Portraits of Two Indians in the Court of Napoleon

This paper looks at the career of Catherine Grand née Worle, born in the Danish colony of Tranquebar in 1761 and a resident of Chandernagore in her childhood and early youth. Catherine’s marriage with an East India Company officer, George François Grand, and her affair with Philip Francis, a member of Warren Hastings’s governing council, was one of the longest-running scandals of its time, leading to a libel action, a divorce and a duel. However, this paper is interested in Madame Grand’s career in France after the mid-1780s where she became part of the smart set and subsequently the mistress of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, foreign minister under Napoleon and one of the few survivors from the ancien régime. Their relationship created uproar and Talleyrand was ordered by Napoleon to either marry her or leave her, so in 1802 they married in the presence of the First Consul and Madame Bonaparte. But despite being a friend of Madame Bonaparte, and one of the first ladies of the court, Madame Grand—now the Princesa de Benevento—was referred to in the most disparaging terms by contemporary commentators, who seem to have gone along unquestioningly with Talleyrand's own view of Catherine as ‘une indienne, bien belle, bien paresseuse, la plus desoccupée de toutes les femmes que j'ai jamais rencontrées’– i.e. an Indian, very beautiful, very idle, one of the laziest women I have ever known.’ The fact that she was considered to be ‘une indienne’ seems to have triggered off all sorts and conditions of xenophobia, and she was widely perceived as an outsider who could not master even the rudiments of the French language. Talleyrand wrote of her as ‘Une Indienne bien belle,’ Napoleon at St Helena referred to her as ‘Anglaise ou Indienne;’ and Capefique in the Biographie Universelle referred to her as ‘rare and nonchalante beauté Indienne.’ This paper will look at a number of such accounts, as well as at two famous paintings of Madame Grand, to report on what may well have been a textbook instance of orientalism. Key words: Mme Grand, Chandernagore, Talleyrand-Périgord, Napoleon, indienne.