This delightful (piquant, the comtesse would say) pseudonymous work was in fact written not “by herself” but by Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon (1786-1864). The persona created is that of a woman who always tells the truth as she sees it, but it is made clear to the reader that what the narrator sees is very seldom exactly the objective truth. The author ends as well as begins _in medias res_ (in the middle of the action), thus creating an illusion of a slice of a journal but simultaneously giving the reader the uneasy feeling that the first and last chapters seem to be missing. The French-style quotation marks have, for ease in typesetting and use, been changed to American-style quotatio…
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