I know Astolphe de Custine mostly as an esthete, failed novelist and minor figure (and pretty much a social outcast, being an old homosexual and sugar daddy with the wrong political opinions for the more important Salons) gravitating around Frédéric Chopin (and also Balzac, Hugo, Lamartine, Delacroix, etc.) in the 1830s (George Sand and most of the Romantics like the Liszt-d'Agoult couple hated or loathed him, so Chopin and him grew distant for a while). I've mostly read (and help a friend translate) part of his correspondence, some reviews etc. though I have read many excerpts from his travel diaries along the way. Don't buy it expecting a work of the importance or quality of Tocqueville's, though the themes/topics forcibly brings comparisons. There are good reasons why his works have been totally forgotten for over a 100 years, before La Russie en 1839 attracted interest again. Historians got interested again mostly because his commentaries on Nicolas II's Russia often still applied to post-war Soviet Russia.
As I may have noted, that was the context in which I was made aware of it. Now I'm wondering if there is even an English translation, since the writers I've seen cite him were both Francophone historians. I might still check it out if I can without too much trouble, but if he's as insignificant as you say, it probably won't be.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
