Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord served an absolute king, helped overthrow him, served the revolution, helped install Napoleon, and then helped restore the monarchy. This episode asks whether the man nicknamed the lame devil was a self-serving turncoat or a pragmatic patriot who held France together.

We trace how a foot condition cost him his inheritance and pushed him into a church he did not believe in, his work as agent general of the clergy, and his push to nationalize church property. We follow his exile in England and the United States, his years as Napoleon’s foreign minister, his secret coaching of Tsar Alexander at Erfurt, his diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna, and his carefully negotiated deathbed reconciliation.

• How a congenital foot condition redirected Talleyrand from the army into the Catholic Church
• Why he led the nationalization of church property and was excommunicated in 1791
• His time in America, his oath to Pennsylvania, and why he saw loyalty as a temporary contract
• Betraying Napoleon at Erfurt, and the famous shit in a silk stocking insult
• How he won France a seat at the Congress of Vienna, and the unintended consequences for Prussia