The Memoirs of Count Grammont — Volume 01

The Memoirs of Count Grammont is the wickedest portrait of aristocratic France ever put to paper. Written by Count Hamilton as a loving tribute to his scandal-prone brother-in-law, it follows the Chevalier from the siege of Trino to the glittering courts of Louis XIV and Charles II. But this is no earnest military chronicle. Hamilton wields gossip as a weapon, crafting a memoir that reads like the best kind of slander: everything true, nothing proven, every word designed to make the reader blush and laugh in equal measure. Grammont himself emerges as an irresistible reprobate: maddeningly charming, impossibly lucky at cards, forever stumbling into romantic disasters he somehow survives. The book crackles with the voltage of a society where wit is warfare and every handshake conceals a dagger. Eighteenth-century readers recognized it immediately for what it remains: a merciless, affectionate, infinitely funny exposure of how the powerful amuse themselves.