The famous love letters of the Portuguese nun MARIANNA ALCOFORADO (1640-1723), which bring a breath of life and nature into the stilted writing of that day, only belong to Portuguese literature in the sense that Osorio’s history belongs to it--by translation. They first appeared in indifferent French (_Lettres Portvgaises_, Paris, 1669) and were not retranslated, or, if we accept the theory that the nun originally wrote them in French[616]--French _suranné et dénué d’élégance_--translated into Portuguese for a century and a half: _Cartas de uma Religiosa Portugueza_ (1819).[617] Meanwhile, even before their obscure author died in the remote and beautiful city of Beja, they had been translated into English and Italian and had received over fifty French editions. Colonel (later Marshal) Noël Bouton, Comte de Saint-Léger, afterwards Marquis de Chamilly (1636-1715), accompanied the French troops sent to help Portugal against Spain, and was in Portugal from 1665 to 1667. Marianna Alcoforado, belonging to an old Alentejan family, was a nun in the convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição at Beja. Her five letters, written between the end of 1667 and the middle of 1668 after her desertion, in their artlessness, contradictions, and disorder, vibrate with emotion. They are a succession of intense cries like the popular quatrain: Por te amar deixei a Deus: Ve lá que gloria perdi! E agora vejo-me só, Sem Deus, sem gloria, sem ti. Sometimes, it is true, a trace of French reason seems to mingle with the ingenuous Portuguese sentiment, and it is almost incredible, although of course not impossible, since _omnia vincit amor_, that the nun should have written certain passages. From these and not on the amazing assumption of Rousseau that a mere woman could not write so passionately--he was ready to wager that the letters were the work of a man[618]--one may suspect that the lover, who did not scruple to hand over the letters to a publisher (unless he was merely guilty of showing them to his friends), sank a little lower and edited them, adding a phrase here and there more peculiarly pleasing to his vanity.[619] In that case the nun actually wrote these letters, full of passion and despair, and perhaps in French, to her French lover; but we only read them as they were touched up for publication by another hand.