Love Notes and Letters : And, the Letter Case

This volume offers the first translation into English of two seminal works by the seventeenth-century French woman author, Marie-Catherine Desjardins, better known as Madame de Villedieu. The first of these works, Lettres et billets galants Love Notes and Letters], was published in 1668 and contains her most intimate letters to her lover, Antoine de Villedieu. The second work, Le Portefeuille The Letter Case], which appeared in 1674, is an epistolary novel composed of a series of ten letters from the Marquis de Naumanoir to a nobleman in the provprovinces. These letters recount in a delightfully playful manner the amorous misadventures and intrigues of a half-dozen Parisian socialites. This work's close ties in terms of content and form to the publication of Villedieu's Lettres et billets gallants six years earlier make it a perfect complement. The author's introduction offers not only a critical interpretation of these works but stresses the importance of the publication of Desjardins' authentic correspondence as a turning point in her career and key to her later works.