The subject of this study is the understanding of literature displayed by important French and Italian authors from Castiglione and Montaigne to Chateaubriand and Alfieri, who as members of the high aristocracy refused to adopt institutionalized auctorial roles. As 'the last witness of feudal mores' Frangois-Reni de Chateaubriand experienced the decline of the aristocratic way of life at first hand and engaged with this phenomenon in his works. In Romanticism, which he himself helped to establish, the aristocracy is transformed from the subject to the object of literature, thus becoming a fiction in its own right.