Louis de Brancas, duke of VILLARS (1663-1739) diplomat. L.A.S., Paris July 10, 1681; 5 1/2 pages in-4. Account of his return from a diplomatic mission to Rome. His march was less hasty and much more tiring than expected: "I was visited up to Genoa in three and a half days. But I saw myself stopped by a similar accident that happened to my people, [as well as] to the doctor of his eminence at the voiage of Ligourne with the marquis of Bellefons so that not being able to advance by land and seeing myself in the necessity to remain eight days in Genes I had better go to Marseilles "... But instead of that he was ten days in Antibes, and his people healed and himself tired of the sea, he took again land, "but from there to Avignon there was no regulated post with all the mountains of provances to cross so that I was in Lion only in seventeen days. I left Lion and came to Nevers in a few hours, where the fever took me and I sent the package that his eminence gave me for Mr. de Croissi with the other letters except those that he had the goodness to write to the king for me, which I kept"... He arrived in Paris on June 30. He went to Versailles with the marshal d'Estrées: "I came back in the evening with a great cold which gives me a fever almost every evening"; he was therefore unable to go to pay his duties to the marquis de Cœuvres... Enclosed: Letter of a French ecclesiastic written from Rome to a gentleman of his friends, Rome February 4, 1703, on the earthquake (4 p. impr.).