Sainte-Beuve, in his essay on Madame, suggested to the French editor of her letters that he should make a more complete collection of them. M. Brunet professes to have done so in the edition from which this translation is selected.[2] But when examined the additions prove very insignificant, and the arrangement, though apparently more chronological, interferes with the interest of the reader. Passages which seem to belong together are cut up into sentences and scattered singly over weeks and months; so that the point of Madame's racy representations is often weakened. In this translation parts of the letters of each year on a given topic are put together, so as to offer a better picture of Madame's thought; as for her nature, she gives that herself, and no one can better the portrait. Nothing need be added to Sainte-Beuve's admirable essay beyond a brief account of Madame's parentage, family relations, and the history, such as it is, of her correspondence. She was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Soon after her birth, her father, Charles-Louis, Elector Palatine, parted from his wife, Charlotte of Hesse-Cassel, and the little daughter, Élisabeth-Charlotte, was given to the care of her father's sister, Sophia, Electress of Hanover (mother of George I. of England); with whom she remained until her marriage, against her wishes, in 1671, to Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV., after the death of his first wife, Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England. The marriage was political,--Louis XIV. seeking to acquire rights in the Palatinate, and subsequently in Bavaria. The father of Élisabeth-Charlotte, after parting from his wife, married morganatically Louise de Degenfeld, by whom he had five sons and three daughters,--these children being of course excluded from the succession. Madame, in her ill-assorted and personally mortifying marriage, of which she bravely strove to make the best, found all her comfort in writing letters, a very small portion of which have been preserved. All those addressed during her married life to her beloved aunt, the Electress of Hanover, have disappeared, probably destroyed by the judicious aunt herself, for Madame alludes to them as containing secrets she did not write to others. Among the many personages to whom she wrote habitually were: Duke Antoine Ulrich of Brunswick; her two unmarried half-sisters, Louise and Amélie, Countesses Palatine; her step-daughters, to whom she was warmly attached, Marie-Louise, wife of Charles II., King of Spain, and Anne-Marie, wife of Victor-Amadeus, Duke of Savoie and King of Sardinia and Sicily (the mother of Marie-Adélaïde, Duchesse de Bourgogne); and her own daughter, the Duchesse de Lorraine. Besides these, she had a number of correspondents on the other side of the Rhine, such as her cousins the Queen of Prussia and the Duchess of Modena; her old governess in Hanover; Leibnitz in Leipzig; also the Princess of Wales, Wilhelmina-Caroline of Brandebourg-Anspach, in London.