reflects on the whole of aristocratic history in elaborating new rationales for noble behaviour. The memoirs of Princess Dashkov record the life of the Russian elite, at home and abroad, under Catherine, and the first volume of Alexander Herzen’s describes a noble upbringing in early 19th-century Russia. The literary skill of Chateaubriand makes the memoirs he sold for posthumous publication a memorable romantic description of changing noble fortunes over the revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals. The sad dissolution of the Irish Ascendancy is movingly portrayed in David Thompson,

Woodbrook.

A trivial romp through what was left of noble ideals by the mid-20th century is Nancy Mitford (ed.),

Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956). (9) الأرستقراطية في الأدب

Cervantes’s

Don Quixote

is perhaps the best-known petty nobleman in literature, ridiculed and admired in equal measure. On the eve of the French Revolution, the heartlessness of nobles was unblinkingly depicted by Goethe in

The Sorrows of Young Werther , Choderlos de Laclos in

Dangerous Liaisons , or Beaumarchais’s play

The Marriage of Figaro . Classic and timeless portrayals of the everyday values of gentlefolk are the novels of Jane Austen, particularly

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