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.