Count de Stgur. 4G7 



plough or handled a chisel and mallet could learn the arts of war as 

 well as the affected courtiers of the Tuilleries. The author of the 

 Memoires, of which we shall speak presently, endeavours to excul- 

 pate his relative from the heavy charge brought against him by the 

 assertion that he was dragged to the measure by the majority of the 

 King's advisers, a poor excuse for a man who ought rather to have 

 given in his resignation than signed what he knew to be a measure 

 fraught with evil. But he was a Segur ; and the whole family are 

 well known, as having been led by the love of place to cry out, as 

 the times required, Vive le Roi, vive la ligue: indeed their history 

 would form a very pretty chapter in the biography of political rene- 

 gades. The revolution, which stripped him of his property, saved 

 his life ; and the generosity of Bonaparte when first consul supplied 

 him with those aids that were necessary to soothe his declining years-.. 

 He died at an advanced age in 1801. His two sons acquired some 

 celebrity at Court and in the fashionable salons of the Capital, the 

 younger by many light writings now forgotten, but well relished by 

 the superficial thinkers of his time, the elder partly by writings of 

 the same kind, partly by those of a more serious and praiseworthy 

 character, of which he must make some mention. 



Count Louis Philippe de Segur, a major-general and a peer of 

 France, member of the French Academy, &c., son of Marshal Segur, 

 was born at Paris in 1753, where after a brilliant career as a student, 

 he embraced the military profession. This, however, happened at a 

 time of peace, when fawning courtiers gained promotion not by 

 valorous achievements, but by successful intrigue ; and thus there 

 was no other proof of his courage practicable beyond what duelling 

 could furnish. Of his different rencontres in duels he gives a most 

 piquant account in his Memoires. Without ever facing an enemy, 

 the young soldier became a colonel in 1776 ; but this circumstance 

 need not cause surprise, when the Count tells us in his Memoires (p. 

 121) that there were colonels as young as seven, fit leaders indeed 

 for the whiskered veterans of the old army ! During his colonelcy 

 of the Regiment Soissonois he served in two campaigns of the war of 

 American Independence, where he ardently desired distinction in 

 company with Lafayette ; but unfortunately he arrived only at the 

 end of the war, shortly before Washington and Rochambeau closed 

 the contest by obliging the English army to lay down their arms at 

 New York. The first volume of his Memoires contains an account of 

 these events : but the brilliance of later writers on the same subject 

 have thrown M. de Segur quite into the shade. After his return to 

 France in 1783, he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary at the 

 Court of Russia, where he discovered a diplomatic adroitness, which 

 gained him praise at Versailles. His talents, however, were only 

 tried on secondary projects; for, luckily, the division of Poland had 

 already taken place, thanks to the folly of Louis XV. 's government 

 and to the machiavellism and political cunning of Frederic the 

 Great and Catherine of Russia. The narrative of Crimea with the 

 Czarina forms a highly interesting portion of his Memoires^which, 

 although yet in an unfinished state, have acquired such popularity^ 

 as to have gone through three editions. 



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