When the terrors of the French Revolution had passed, many of those aristocrats who had survived sat down to write their memoirs about the last years of the ancien régime, and the turmoil that followed. Seldom has there been an age, or a group of people, so committed to remembering and recording, whose existence was predicated on subtlety of thought and eloquence of expression. Often they wrote at great length: the memoirs of the Duchesse d’Abrantès run to 18 volumes; those of the Comtesse de Genlis to 10. This need to write was born both of nostalgia for a time when they had been rich and powerful, and a desire to fix for ever, as one courtier put it, “the forms, the spirit and the manners that belonged to the world of high society”.
Among these highly literate people were seven men whom Benedetta Craveri has chosen for a sequel to The Age of Conversation, her marvellous earlier account of the women who presided over the Parisian salons of the 17th and 18th centuries. Not all seven lived to see the end of the revolution, but they had been, one way or another, writing for decades and their letters and diaries were found and published, along with descriptions of them by those who escaped with their lives. Four – the Duc de Lauzun (later Duc de Biron), the Duc de Brissac, the Chevalier de Boufflers, the Comte de Narbonne – were soldiers and sometime diplomats and politicians. The Vicomte Joseph-Alexandre de Ségur was a poet and songwriter; the Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur, a diplomat and historian. The Comte de Vaudreuil was an art collector and talented amateur actor.
