HER LIFE AND LETTERS. BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON. "On veut des romans, que ne regarde-t-on de près à l'histoire ?" IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1858. The right of Translation is reserved. 210. c.99. PREFACE. THE lady whose history forms the groundwork of the following sketch, and whose letters are for the first time published in English, was connected by birth and marriage with a number of persons who played a conspicuous part in the courts and camps of Europe during the earlier portion of the eighteenth century; that is, at a period when Paris was universally con sidered as the capital of the civilised world. The age in which her lot was cast, and the names which present themselves in connection with that of the Countess de Bonneval lend a peculiar interest to the brief notices of her fate, which are to be met with in the writers of that period. By a careful examination of the memoirs of the time, through isolated facts casually recorded by contemporary historians, but chiefly by means of her own letters, accidentally preserved and transmitted to posterity, an attempt has been made to study the character, to reproduce the features, to present, as it were, to the readers the picture of a person whom M. Sainte-Beuve, in his "Causeries du Lundi," introduces to our notice as "one of the most pure and, at the time of the Regency, one of the most rare examples of female virtue; a graceful exception to the general profligacy of that era." This work is not a biography, and still less a novel; but rather a sketch, in which imagination has ventured to fill up the scanty outlines of history, following step by step the indications it affords, and seeking rather to guess than to invent, to interpret than to originate. Everybody is probably acquainted with the name of the Comte de Bonneval, whose follies and crimes, whose exploits and misfortunes, gave occasion even during his lifetime to the publication of spurious memoirs, which he designates in his letters as an ill-written romance, full of gross inventions and glaring falsehoods." His numerous adventures and his military prowess were in reality sufficiently remark 66 |