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Using the letters written by the Duke of Lévis to his young wife during the Revolution, this paper aims to document the convergence of these epistolary writings with a later body of novelistic writing stretching from Chateaubriand’s René to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Specifically, the figures of the aristocrat, then of the émigré, and the embodiments of protest against the new social order created by the Revolution will be examined. By comparing writings on the self with an elaborate conceptual framework for the novel developed by Georg Lukács and Pierre Barbéris, we show beyond a generic divergence a certain continuity of writing and preoccupations linked to bourgeois modernity and to sources of Romanticism.