Cinq lettres de Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger à Helvétius

Marie-Thérèse Inguenaud and David Smith : Five letters from Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger to Helvétius. Five holograph letters by Boulanger (by whom only letter one was hitherto known) are here published ; they were written to Helvétius shortly before his death, between January and August 1759. Although they are all unsigned or signed with a pseudonym ; they can nevertheless be formally attributed to Boulan¬ ger thanks to the handwriting and the content. The first is the original of the prefaratory Letter from the author to M... in the Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme oriental, whose attribution was generally contested. The four others, all hitherto unknown, share the common theme of illness. They are interesting in that they confirm the biographical elements provided by Diderot in his preface to L'Antiquité dévoilée as well as throwing some light on an unknown character and providing precise information on medical practice in the mid-18th Century.