A warning from the Curator
A frustrated person's notes sent "on accident" with another pile of letters that was unfortunately lost.
I was tasked by my Masters to proofread their letters before they would send them. As a Curator, my mission is to track and suppress spelling mistakes that would make one’s letter unreadable; though, I confess, my noble Masters promptly rebuffed my corrections at countless occasions.
They are unaware that they all employ the very same Curator – me. I admit, I do think it serves them well. Charged with the care of setting their correspondence in order, I have, in fact, endeavoured to preserve some brief and rare notes, which I liked to pen down whenever it struck my fancy. These notes, for the most part, have no other object than that of indicating the source of certain quotations, or of recalling some information that my patrons would not permit me to forget. If this labour comes to anyone’s knowledge, the share which I have had in this work will have been told. My mission was of no wider range.1
As I said previously, I had proposed alterations more considerable, and almost all in respect of diction or style, against which will be found many offences. This task, which has not been permitted me, would doubtless not have sufficed to give merit to my patrons’ pen, but it would, at least, have freed it from a portion of its defects. It has been objected to me that it was the letters themselves that should be read in their authenticity by their addressee, not merely a work made after those letters.
I was not my own master, and I gave way. As for any degree of merit the work may have, perhaps it is not for me to discuss this, for my opinion neither ought to nor can influence that of anyone else.
What I must say is that, I wish I could advise my Masters to publish these letters after their death. If they ever were, I am nevertheless far from hoping for their success. That being said, and contradictory as it may seem, if this compilation had not seemed to me worthy of being offered to the public, I would not have meddled with it.
It seems to me, at any rate, that it is to render a service to morals, to unveil the methods employed by those whose own are bad in corrupting those whose conduct is good; and I believe that these letters could effectually attain this end, if my patrons keep showing so little affection for Religion and Kindness in their upcoming exchanges.
I continue to think that this collection could please very few if it were published. Men and women who are depraved would have an interest in decrying a work calculated to injure them; and, as they are not lacking in skill, perhaps they would have sufficient to bring to their side the austere, who would be alarmed at the picture of bad morals which my patrons never fear to exhibit. On the other hand, persons of delicate taste would be disgusted by the too simple and too faulty style of many of these letters.
It will perhaps be pretty generally said that everything is good in its own place. In any case, my work is to remain unseen, this correspondence, private. I now abandon my frustration – there are more letters coming, more revisions to do. I must hurry. The Postmasters are not known for their patience.2
[Curator’s footnote : I must also state that I have suppressed or altered all the names of persons which occur in these letters. In doing so, I complied to my patrons’ wishes. And if, among the names I have substituted for them, any is to be found which belongs to a real person, this arises solely from error on my part, and no conclusion is to be drawn therefrom.]
Hello. I am the Editor of this newsletter. The Curator’s warning exists in the original text but was modified to fit the “real people writing in real time” format and not the “I’m trying to prove these letters are real and that I definitely didn’t write them myself” novel format. The Curator’s footnotes are their own but some of them, in this newsletter version, were added to explain some context or words to you. They are based on the academic notes of Michel Delon in the Le Livre de poche edition of the book. I melded these extra notes (after translating them and adapting them) with the Curator’s footnotes as to break the reality effect as little as possible. In order to achieve the same goal, the Editor’s warning (me, if you want. But you can also consider I killed them. Or killed another version of myself. Or that I’m 300 year old. Your choice) that opens the original text was omitted. There is no Editor here.
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