In the first rank of French statesmen and diplomats of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century stands Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, who for more than half a century, under the most opposite political regimes, was involved in all the important affairs of his country, and played a great part in all the contemporaneous history of Europe. The memoirs were collected from the French National Archives by Leon Vallee, Librarian of the Bibliotheque Nationale.