Of these letters (scarcely any remaining extant except those to her half-sisters) fragments first appeared at Stuttgard in 1789, subsequently in Paris, in 1807, 1823, 1832. In 1843 the first edition in a volume was published at Stuttgard by M. Wolfgang Menzel, a translation of which by M. Brunet appeared in Paris in 1853. That translation was made from the German volume, the original letters having disappeared in a conflagration. A subsequent edition, with a few insignificant additions as mentioned above, appeared a few years later, from the last issue of which the present translation has been selected. M. Brunet remarks in his preface, that "Madame had the habit of reproducing almost in the same terms the details which she gave of the same events to diverse persons. She wrote with extreme rapidity, passing, without any transition, from one subject to another, piling up useless words and insignificant particulars which it would be quite absurd to try to reproduce. Expressions of regret at the deaths or the illnesses of Madame's numerous relatives, interminable protestations of friendship, wearisome repetitions, swelled beyond all measure the letters that came into the hands of M. Menzel, who cut off two-thirds of them, preserving such parts only as had a more or less general interest and an historical value." The following letters are almost exclusively addressed to her half-sisters, and chiefly to the Comtesse Louise, the Comtesse Amélie having died in 1709. The names of her correspondents do not precede the letters in the French edition, except in a few instances. Madame needs no interpreter, for even her vituperative faculty conveys its own correction; her hatred to Mme. de Maintenon becomes amusing, and we are quite able to see the justice and the injustice of it. Her favourite term for her enemy is, however, so outrageous (_la vieille guenipe_, the old slut, or any such equivalent--once she descends to saying _la vieille truie_) that it is more agreeable to the reader to keep the word in French than to constantly repeat it in English. Madame died on the 8th of December, 1722, at the age of seventy, just one year before the death of her son, the regent. She was buried in Saint-Denis, and Massillon pronounced her funeral oration. * * * * * The letters of Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne and dauphine, are of little value, as the reader will see, if judged historically, or as a document on the manners and customs of a period. They are placed here as a contemporary record of a tender and pathetic young life on its passage, through frivolity and ill-health, to a premature death just as age had corrected her defects, and the prospect of being, with her husband, the blessing and salvation of France was dawning before her. * * * * *