Sur les Lettres diverses d’Henry Le Bret, éditeur de Cyrano et prévôt de l’Église de Montauban

The Lettres diverses attributed to Henry Le Bret were published anonymously, without any date nor place of publication. This article deals with three problems : authorship, datation and Le Bret’s direct involvement in its publication.Le Bret’s paternity of Lettres diverses, included the only letter addressed to himself, is proven mainly by his signature found in many of them and by his attested private relationships with the majority of addressees. The publication date is resolved after a meticulous comparison of Lettres diverses and Recueil de quelques discours et lettres écrites à des personnes studieuses sur differentes matieres (1692), in which 15 letters (out of the 64 of Lettres diverses) are present with some variations. From an omission in the Recueil I theorized that a great number of pages from a published copy of Lettres diverses were detached/untied and reused as a material hypotext for the Recueil ; this theory is substantiated and confirmed by a lot of informations related to events, books, and people, especially to Bossuet, Queen Marie-Thérèse and the Clergy Assembly of 1665. All these data lead to the conclusion that Lettres diverses were published between 1678 and May 1681, which invalidates all previous datations proposed by Lacroix, Forestié, Cioranescu, and myself in 2004.And finally there is no historical evidence nor objective argument for believing that Le Bret did not want his readers to know that he was responsible for the publication of these letters : the book was obviously destined to a private and chosen group of friends, which was not uncommon in xviith century. In 1692, given his geographic and not so private new public, Le Bret withdrew from Lettres diverses all the ones addressed to his Parisian friends as well as some destined to Toulousan ladies in which good taste was questionable (like his Eloge de la petite vérole, i. e. small-pox).We can now reformulate the bibliographical description of this book : Lettres diverses par Henry Le Bret, prévôt de l’église cathédrale de Montauban, Montauban (?), ca 1678-1681.Among the addenda completing this article are a brief account of the controversy between Le Bret and the minister Pierre Isarn, a restitution of one of his remarks concerning Boileau’s Satire IX, and his quasi unknown éloge de la petite vérole