o
its editor, it differed in nothing from the preceding, except that the
dates of some of the letters were suppressed, a part of the notes cut
out, and some passages added from the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, together
with a life, or rather panegyric, of the Princess, which bore no slight
resemblance to a village homily.

A copy of the extracts made by M. de Praun fell by some chance into the
hands of Count de Veltheim, under whose direction they were published at
Strasburg, in 1789, with no other alterations than the correction of the
obsolete and vicious orthography of the Princess.

In 1789 a work was published at Dantzick, in Germany, entitled,
Confessions of the Princess Elizabeth-Charlotte of Orleans, extracted
from her letters addressed, between the years 1702 and 1722, to her
former governess, Madame de Harling, and her husband. The editor asserts
that this correspondence amounted to nearly four hundred letters. A
great part of these are only repetitions of what she had before written
to the Princess of Wales and the Duke of Brunswick. Since that period no
new collections have appeared, although it is sufficiently well known
that other manuscripts are in existence.

In 1820 M. Schutz published at Leipsig the Life and Character of
Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans, with an Extract of the more
remarkable parts of her Correspondence. This is made up of the two
German editions of 1789 and 1791; but the editor adopted a new
arrangement, and suppressed such of the dates and facts as he considered
useless. His suppressions, however, were not very judicious; without
dates one is at a loss to know to what epoch the facts related by the
Princess ought to be referred, and the French proper names are as
incorrect as in the edition of Strasburg.

Feeling much surprise that in France there should have been no more
authentic edition of the correspondence of the Regent-mother than the
miserable translation of 1788 and 1807, we have set about rendering a
service to the history of French manners by a new and more faithful
edition. The present is a translation of the Strasburg edition, arranged
in a more appropriate order, with the addition of such other passages as
were contained in the German collections. The dates have been inserted
wherever they appeared necessary, and notes have been added wherever the
text required explanation, or where we wished to compare the assertions
of the Princess with other testimonies.