Current Literature
MEMOIRS OF THE COMTE DE GRAMONT Translated by Peter Quenneli and edited by Cyril Hughes Hartmann
Hamilton's Memoirs of the Comte de Gramont. (Routledge, 78. 6d.) rank with Pepys' diary in their •brilliant picture of the Court of Charles H. They are vivid and scandalously inaccurate accounts of the appearance, manners, and amorous intrigues of the courtiers among whom the Chevalier de Gramont spent his exile. Written as they were in French (although by an Englishman), they have waited a very long time for an adequate translation. -Mr. Quennell's could not be bettered. He has captured not only the brilliance and polish of the original but its occasionally pompous formality too; and Hamilton's work can at last be as fully appreciated in English as in French. When we consider the admirably told Savoy episodes which took place before Gramont caine to England and which he must have narrated to his brother-in- law, we are led to wonder to whom the style of the finished memoirs is chiefly due : but, however they worked, Hamilton and the Chevalier made an excellent collaboration. Mr. Hartmann's introduction is a masterly survey of the style, scope, 'prejudices, malice, and literary reputation of Anthony Hamilton, which sums up the value of the Memoirs better than any other estimate known to us. The apparatus critieus is unobtrusive but complete. Instead of footnotes, there is a commentary at the end in which Mr. Hartmann gives bio- graphical notices of all the people, not only English but foreign, mentioned in the Memoirs. He has also disentangled Hamilton's chronology : no mean task with an author who, for artistic effect, removes his hero's marriage from the middle to the end of his story. Even Mr. Hartmann cannot wholly sort out such episodes as the Duke of York's affair with Lady Chesterfield, but, as he says himself, " the Memoirs were never meant to be regarded as a serious historical work faithfully related in correct sequence, but simply as a galli- maufry of gossip partly told to Hamilton by Gramont, and partly drawn from his own recollections and those of his family and friends." As such, they have never lost their appeal : and the work of Mr. Quennell and Mr. Hartmann, now issued at a new and popular price, will henceforward be the standard edition of an inimitable book.
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