LAMOTHE LANGON - Rare ouvrage/ Mémoires et souvenirs d'une femme de qualité. - 1830-1831

LAMOTHE LANGON: Memoirs and recollections of a woman of quality. Paris, Mame et Delaunay-Vallée, Booksellers, 1830-1831. 12/12 (complete)
Approximately 400 pages per volume, 21x14 cm, 7 kg (including packaging).
Very rare collection of these anecdotal apocryphal memoirs covering about thirty years of life at court. Four volumes concern the Empire, six the Restoration, and two the July Monarchy. Absent from Tulard. Bertier, 592
Memoirs and recollections of a woman of quality on the Consulate and the Empire - Memoirs of a woman of quality on Louis XVIII, his court and his reign - Memoirs of a woman of quality since the death of Louis XVIII until the end of 1829 - Revelations of a woman of quality on the years 1830 and 1831.
Identical and uniform binding (period) in half-calf leather, smooth spine gilt-tooled. Author's name, title and volume numbers gilded.
Wear and signs of use typical with no serious damage at corners worn and a bit bumped, edges and spine, scratches from use on the book boards. Interior satisfactory.

The invention, or the subterfuge of a narrator 'woman of quality' allows the author a true and intimate portrait of the court evolving around Napoleon Bonaparte, and just as well of that of Louis XVIII and of the Restoration; the whole possesses a real note of truth and the criticisms are never frontal but diffused in the heroine's perception of events. The direct testimony of a woman on history was indeed very fashionable, as the Mémoires d'une contemporaine published in 1827 and 1828 which met with great success. A woman of high nobility and whose mentor was Madame de Staël, our heroine is introduced to the court of Bonaparte. The literary deception is perfect in the sense that one follows the character's evolution chronologically through history, but within the court. One encounters there, with the greatest pleasure, all the players of these periods, both political and artistic (Girodet, Mercier, Lannes...). It must be stressed that these are by no means historical memoirs but the romantic life of a woman at court; one finds more the literature of the eighteenth century (Prévost, Lesage, Marivaux) than the pamphleteering critiques of Chateaubriand on the same eras.
Lamothe Langon was made an Empire Baron and had an administrative career under Bonaparte, he lost his post under the Restoration and devoted himself to writing to earn a living.