The Russian nobility's mastery of the French language is, without a doubt, the most striking element of French influence in Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And yet, to date, scholars have accorded relatively little attention to this period of Russian francophonie, the relationship that existed between French and Russian and the domains the two languages occupied, although in recent years it has become clear that Russian noblewomen's francophone life-writing is fruitful ground for such investigations. Placing particular emphasis on the use of Russian, Elena Gretchanaia and Catherine Viollet have investigated noblewomen's code-switching and language mixing in their French-language personal diaries (Gretchanaia 2009; Viollet 2010) and, with a focus on women in the context of the nobility's cultural bilingualism, Michelle Lamarche Marrese has examined alternation between French and Russian in correspondence (Marrese 2010).

However, little is known about the circumstances in which women abandoned the use of French in favour of other European languages, including Russian, while they were travelling. The published and manuscript French-language travel narratives under discussion in the present chapter, (epistolary) diaries, reminiscences and memoirs authored between 1777 and 1848, contain valuable information on women's use of and capacities in various languages, as during travel they found themselves in a number of different language zones and had increased opportunities to use languages other than French and Russian. In unfamiliar environments the use of certain languages, taken out of their usual contexts in the lives of the women, became more or less appropriate, useful or adequate.

This chapter, then, acknowledges the dominance of French among the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian elite, but also reveals that, in fact, multilingualism was not unusual. For Russian noblewomen in particular, knowledge of foreign languages was required for social success and was a direct result of women's education. They learnt a number of languages from an early age from their mothers and governesses and in schools. Some also spent much of their childhood abroad. Their travel narratives show that as well as French and Russian, they also knew, in ascending order of the number of cases, German, English and Italian.