It had been a very good evening indeed, and the port had probably been passed around a few times when Colonel Gouraud brought out his phonograph machine and stuck its huge recording horn in front of Robert Browning.
It was April 1889, and the poet was 76 and slightly deaf.
The company exhorted him to shout something into the horn, a poem perhaps.
Browning began one of his most famous - How They Brought The Good News From Ghent To Aix - but stopped after a few lines. "I'm sorry," he said, "I can't remember me own verses, but one thing that I shall remember all me life is the astonishing [inaudible] by your wonderful invention."
Browning only lived a few more months, but his recording on a wax cylinder, the earliest of any writer, is one of the remarkable treasures that have been assembled from the vast sound archives of the British Library, and are released on two CDs today.
The recordings include several which have either never been heard or never been published before. They include the only surviving section of PG Wodehouse's wartime radio broadcasts from Berlin, the recordings which made him a pariah - many believe unjustly - for the rest of his life.
The creator of Jeeves and Wooster was captured by the advancing Germans in Le Touquet on the French coast in 1940 and imprisoned before being brought to Berlin and invited to broadcast about his experiences to the United States, which had yet to enter the war.
Richard Fairman, one of a team of curators who have put the CDs together, said that Wodehouse suffered greatly for "making an ass of myself", as he himself later put it.
"He was asked to do some lighthearted broadcasts, basically to tell his fans in the US that he had survived. But by the time the war finished and the true story of what happened emerged, Wodehouse had been discredited because the propaganda machine had kicked in against him.
"What this recording about his time in Loos prison shows is that he was just being himself and said nothing in support of the Germans, in fact if anything he gently poked fun at them. But since no one in Britain had actually heard the broadcast, they assumed the worst."
The writer never returned to England and was seen by some as a traitor until his death.
Another hugely significant and up till now unbroadcast recording is of the writer Vita Sackville-West reading from an early proof of her friend and lover Virginia Woolf's book Orlando, whose eponymous heroine was based on Sackville-West.
To add spice, Sackville-West concentrates on extracts that did not make it into the first published edition.
Woolf herself is also represented, in an extract from a radio talk she gave in 1937 on craftsmanship. This seems to be the only known recording of her rather deep, plummy and very odd voice.
The aged Robert Browning may have beaten Alfred Lord Tennyson to the record books as the first audio author, but the poet laureate was an energetic champion of the new technology.
He made at least 23 recordings, mostly of his great showstopper, The Charge Of The Light Brigade.
So enamoured was Tennyson with this newfangled device that a phonograph was left with him on the Isle of Wight so that he could make his own cylinders. Unfortunately, despite plenty of practice the great man still sounds rather like a Dalek to most modern ears.
But Mr Fairman said that it would be unfair to be too judgmental. "At least you can hear the rhythm of the lines. A lot of the voices do sound strange to us. Arthur Conan Doyle and Kipling really do sound like voices from the distant past now. That was a real shock to me.
"But Agatha Christie could have been recorded quite recently, and Noel Coward sounds really modern. The whole way he talked impressed me, his tone, everything. He's really gone up in my estimation."
The CDs are available from the British Library bookshop or its website www.bl.uk/nsa.
Plum's lost broadcast
Extract from Wodehouse's radio broadcast from Berlin in 1941 about his time in Loos prison
"Owing to having led a blameless life since infancy, I had never seen the interior of a calaboose before, and directly I set eyes on the official in the front office, I regretted that I was doing so now. There are moments, as we pass through life, when we gaze into a stranger's face and say to ourselves, 'I have met a friend.' This was not one of those occasions ... Still, an author never quite gives up hope, and I think there was just a faint idea at the back of my mind that mine host, on hearing my name, would start to his feet with a cry of 'Quoi? Monsieur Vodeouse? Embrassez-moi, maitre!' and offer me his bed for the night, adding that he had long been one of my warmest admirers and would I give his little daughter my autograph?
Nothing like that happened."
