Nicolas-Edme RÉTIF DE LA BRETONNE. L.A.S., [Paris] 1st prairial V (May 19, 1797), to citizen Fontaine, Garde-Magazin des Effets des Équipages militaires in Grenoble; 3 pages in-4, address (edges a little frayed, small lack at the top of page 3 by broken seal, with loss of some letters). Beautiful letter to his distant friends, about Monsieur Nicolas. He worries about the good routing of his letters, because of the censorship of the Directory, and confides freely: "Where does it come from that the laziest Home in the world to write answers you on the spot? It is that fallen in the strangest misfortune, it resembles the Home which drowns; it greedily seizes the hand which presents itself. I don't know what charm the letters of Mad. Fontaine's letters. It was not the praise that touched me, it was a tone of candor and truth. I have no idea of her or of you from the outside. Your souls alone have pleased mine and taken hold of it. It is thus a beautiful intellectual moral of which I wanted to make first the base of the inclination between young people, in my New-Abeillard, and it is not a chimera... ". He had the pain of losing a friend: "Terèse is no more since one year. It is my last loss, & the most sensitive because I am more deprived... What will become of me, Unfortunate! I cry myself after having cried the others! I have no one left, I have lost everything; & all that remains to me, everything, everything contributes only to my torment. I would flee to the end of the earth, if I had the strength and the means"... He evokes his relative M Restif of whom he hopes for nothing: "I will write by politeness to the Home, that I revere nevertheless. To you by inclination. If I let you see the whole horrible truth, you would shudder. I will write it to you only after you have the unveiled human heart, which I would like to know in your hands! [The last volume of Monsieur Nicolas ou le Cœur humain dévoilé will appear in September 1797].