"Sifting Through the Bourqueney papers, one realizes quickly that they are far more than the most important documents from a long and distinguished career. Committed even as a teenager to constructing "an encyclopedia" of his life, Adolphe saved a great deal. In an age when the written word reigned supreme, we know that he devoted up to eight hours a day to his private correspondence.

The responses to these letters and copies of the most important ones he wrote are invaluable beyond official diplomatic history.".

"The papers certainly testify to the power of the letter, and the richness of the human character reflected through the written word. Read them and you share a lifetime, live it day by day and often hour by hour with the intimacy of a diary, but the objectivity of many voices speaking in an often cacophonous manner. You come to know Adolphe de Bourqueney in a way which the oral or visual form cannot transmit.

He is there in all of his complex and frequently contradictory nature: the petty and the grand, the self-serving and the selfless, the rake and the saint. His "encyclopedia" turned out to be exactly that."--BOOK JACKET.