vengeful suicide of his favorite, Roxane, and, it appears, most of the eunuchs. The Chronology can be summarized as follows: Letters 1–21 (1–23): The journey from Isfahan to France, which lasts almost 14 months (from 19 March 1711 to 4 May 1712). Letters 22–89 (24–92): Paris in the reign of Louis XIV, 3 years in all (from May 1712 to September 1715). Letters 90–137 (93–143) plus [Supplementary Letter 8 (145]: the Regency of Philippe d’Orléans, covering five years (from September 1715 to November 1720). Letters 138–150 (146–161): the collapse of the seraglio in Isfahan, approximately 3 years (1717–1720). Epistolary novel Montesquieu never referred to Persian Letters as a novel until "Quelques remarques sur les Lettres persanes (1757)," which begins: "Nothing found more favor in Lettres persanes than to discover in them, unexpectedly, a sort of novel. One sees the beginning, the development, and the end; the various characters are placed in a chain that connects them." Initially, for most of its first readers as well as for its author, the book was not thought of primarily a novel, and even less an "epistolary novel" (as it is often classified now), which was not at that time in any sense a constituted genre. Indeed, it has little in common with the sole model at the time, Guilleragues's Lettres portugaises of 1669. A collection of "letters" in 1721 would more likely evoke the recent tradition of essentially polemical and political periodicals, such as Lettres historiques (1692–1728) or the Jesuits' famous (1703–1776), not to mention Mme Dunoyer's Lettres historiques et galantes (1707–1717) which, in the form of a correspondence between two women, provide a chronicle of the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the beginning of the Regency. Lettres persanes thus helped confirm the vogue of a format that was already more or less established. It is in its numerous imitations – such as Lettres juives (1738) and Lettres chinoises (1739) of Boyer d’Argens, Lettres d’une Turque à Paris, écrites à sa sœur (1730) by Poullain de Saint-Foix (published several times in conjunction with Lettres persanes), and perhaps especially Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747) – not to mention the letter-novels of Richardson – which, between 1721 and 1754, had in effect transformed Lettres persanes into an "epistolary novel". Whence this remark in Montesquieu's Mes Pensées: "My Lettres persanes taught people to write letter-novels" (no. 1621). The epistolary structure is