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<p>Louis Laurent de Federbe Comte de Modave like most eighteenth century Europeans came to India in search of fortune. He failed in his quest dying under tragic circumstances but his memoirs were saved and brought back to France. However it was not until 1971 that Jean Deloche of the Ecole Francaise d'Etreme Orient published a properly collated and annotated text. The memoirs present a fascinating contemporary commentary on the political situation of the rapidly decaying Mughal Empire. His penportraits of the Emperor Shah Alam II of ShujaudDaulah Mirza Najaf Khan and his fellow adventurer and compatriot Rene Madec are particularly valuable. He spent more than a year at the court of Delhi and had the opportunity to observe the emperor closely. The latter comes across as kindly courteous and gentle essentially a family man always surrounded by his sons and never shy of showing his affection for them. The age however demanded a warrior emperor perhaps someone like Aurangzeb but unfortunately Shah Alam had no talent or taste for war. The melancholy ruins that marked the twin capitals of Agra and Delhi did not escape the Count’s notice. His tone becomes elegiac as he contemplates the ‘prodigious number of old palaces ruined caravanserais and other buildings now reduced to an ‘immense mass of ruins and rubble’. One is reminded of the concluding chapter of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the ruins of the Mughal capital also provide ‘ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of Fortune which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works burying empires and cities in a common grave’. About the Author G.S. Cheema is a former civil servant and writes mainly on historical subjects. His first book The Forgotten Mughals came out in 2002. This was followed by Our History Their History (2012) and The Ascent of John Company (2017). In 2014 he published A Memoir of the Mughal Empire a translation of Jean Law de Lauriston's Memoire sur quelques Affaires de L'Empire Mogol. The present work is his second translation of the memoirs of a French adventurer.</p>
