The Marquis de Custine was born in 1790 into an anti-revolutionary background, and brought up in exile by his mother and her lover, Chateaubriand (both his father and grandfather had been guillotined). As a young man he was banished from polite society as a result of a homosexual scandal, but remained a close friend of Stendhal and Balzac and was admired by Baudelaire for his dandyism. In 1835, when de Tocqueville's Democracy in America became a bestseller, Balzac suggested that Custine should do for European perceptions of Russia what de Tocqueville had done for America. Custine went to...