In her magnificently disabused memoirs, Madame de la Tour du Pin showed an astringency and sense of self-criticism sadly lacking in modern bankers and politicians. She spared no one, least of all her own class. Before 1789, she wrote, "We were laughing and dancing on our way to the precipice." As a young heiress, she received nothing but "showers of pin-pricks" from her relations. "I have not come here, citizen, to hear the death warrant of my relatives. I will not importune you further," she told Tallien, the Committee of Public Safety's representative, during the reign of Terror. Her first good meal on arriving in America was "a pleasure so fierce that it surpassed all I had known until then". Chateaubriand resembled a sultan manipulating his harem of adoring women. Talleyrand was worthless but "his charm always penetrated the armour and left one like a bird fascinated by a serpent's gaze"; she used him to advance her husband's career. Only Napoleon with his "winning smile" truly impressed her - she did not see that he too, twice, led France to the precipice.

Caroline Moorehead has written an excellent, lively biography, full of background detail. Quotations from Madame de la Tour du Pin's unpublished letters, which Moorehead has found in French and Belgian chateaux, make the reader not only return to the memoirs themselves, but also long for more. The letters are masterpieces of emotional and political analysis which make many famous 20th-century writers, including Caroline Moorehead's previous subjects Freya Stark and Martha Gellhorn, seem, at times, brittle and dated. A collection would reveal Madame de la Tour du Pin to have been at least as brilliant a letter-writer as two of her models, Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand, and throw new light on the most dramatic period in the history of France.