mouth of him whose actions and sayings we transmit to posterity." And a little farther on the same page he observes, "For my own part I should never have thought that the attention of the Count de Grammont, which is at present so sensible to inconveniences and dangers, would have ever permitted him to entertain amorous thoughts upon the road, if he did not himself dictate to me what I am now writing." No one has thought for a moment that De Grammont was, in point of fact, the author of the Memoirs which bear his name. His excellence as a man of wit was entirely limited to conversation. He is said, however, to have sold the MS. for 1500 livres; and it is added that when the MS. was brought to Fontenelle, then censor of the press, he refused to license it on account of the scandalous conduct imputed to the Court in a party at quinze, described in the third chapter.
It is a somewhat singular omission on the part of all the English editors and annotators of De Grammont, that they do not tell us when the first edition of the Memoirs appeared. If the book was printed in De Grammont's lifetime, which the story of the license granted by Fontenelle to the Count himself certainly supposes, there must have been an edition before 1707, the year in which the Count
