Catherine Grand

Catherine (Worlée) Grand, princesse de Talleyrand-Périgord, painted by François Gerard 1805–6

Catherine Noël Worlée was born in the Danish possession of Tranquebar, India, to a French colonial official stationed at nearby Pondicherry. In 1777, her family moved to Chandernagore, where she met George François Grand, a British civil servant of French-Swiss Huguenot descent stationed at Calcutta. They were wed in Chandernagore in 1778, when Catherine was sixteen.

The couple separated soon after because of her brief but scandalous affair with Sir Philip Francis, deputy of Warren Hastings, and Madame Grand left for London. Catherine had become a courtesan in Paris by 1783, when Vigee Le Brun painted her portrait.[2] She left for Britain just before the French Revolution in 1789 but returned to Paris before 1791. Catherine served as mistress to Claude Antoine de Valdec de Lessart, Francois-August Faveau de Frenilly 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, finally divorcing after Talleyrand entered into an arrangement with Dorothea von Biron, the wife of his nephew, the Duke of Dino.[3]

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.[4]