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229 Note on the French Edition he text that we present here has been established directly from the original letters in the handwriting of Juliette Drouet. Certain of these letters have been published partially or completely in the past; almost a hundred are, to our knowledge, completely unpublished. With virtually only one exception, we have in every instance reproduced the handwritten text. Their sources can be found in the list at the end of this volume. Given that these letters were never intended for publication, a certain number of adjustments have been necessary. Our intervention has been limited to the following: restoration of capital letters at the beginning of sentences, in the titles of books, and in proper nouns; the regularization of excessively light punctuation; the addition between square brackets ([ ]) of some missing words and dates, when these can be determined; the regularization of agreements between subject and verb and between noun and adjective, except when it is a question of a foreign word. In the latter case all errors have been scrupulously respected, since it is important not to invest the author with knowledge that she did not have. For this same reason, although we have corrected rare anomalies in the spelling, we have kept the current spellings of the time period (for example tems, longtems, la plus part, poëte, etc.), as well as the sometimes surprising spelling of proper nouns. These are all cultural realities that do not in any way impede T Some of the information in this note on the French edition is applicable only to that edition and not to my translation where, obviously, original spellings, punctuation, and so on often cannot be preserved or imitated. For emphasis Drouet very often underlines or writes in bigger letters certain words. These instances have been rendered in italics in the French edition. Wherever possible I have preserved this original emphasis (note, however, that italics within square brackets represent editorial interpolations). On a few occasions I have added italics of my own where the translation called for such emphasis [T]. 230 Note on the French Edition the reading. Finally, Juliette occasionally invents a word; it would be unforgivable not to copire (“copy”) these faithfully. As it is inconceivable that the famous “deposition” (L. 7) should be excluded from our collection merely because of its inaccessibility, we have exempted it from our rule of giving only texts that we have established from the original: as an exception we reproduce here the text published by Paul Souchon. EVELYN BLEWER ...

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