An Intendant to a Noble Family at the End of the Old Regime.

Though a great deal has been written about the social and economic situation of the nobility in France at the end of the Old Regime, we know very little of the commoner agents in charge of overseeing their possessions. Such agents were particularly important during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as substantial elements of the aristocracy began leaving their traditional lands in the countryside to take up residence in Paris or in other large towns of the kingdom. Here I would like briefly to examine the case of one such agent, Adrien-Joseph Colson, a lawyer by training who served for almost forty years as the Paris-based intendant of the Longaunay family. We have a remarkable picture of Colson and his activities because of the preservation of over a thousand letters addressed to Roch Lemaigre, the local steward on the Longaunay lands in Berry, a correspondence pursued for almost eighteen years before and during the French Revolution. The letters are all the more revealing in that Colson makes it clear that Lemaigre was his closest friend in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]