Fréron seeks to humiliate the critic Jean-Francois de La Harpe who had attacked his recently deceased father, Elie Fréron. He recounts a dinner at the house of Mr. Dorat during which his father was ridiculed, and speaks of his hopes that the recipient can offer a contradictory account. He notes that he has heard from Mr. de La Harpe that they were discussing Voltaire and the unworthy treatment he received from Fréron in the style of his writing. Louis-Marie questions if the recipient ever remembers seeing his father baffled by a philosophy schoolboy, and asks if it was in his father’s character to say: ‘ah, il écrira et Dieu nous verrons’.

The poem concerns vengeance and love.

In the first of these letters, Proust speaks of being moved by the letters and that he would like to read more of André Benac’s letters to console him as he would have liked to have met him. Proust tells Bénac that he should not speak of revenge but should instead repeat four lines from Act 5, Scene 7 of Voltaire’s Alzire reading: ‘Des Dieux que nous servons connais la différence / La tien t’a commandé le meurtre et la vengeance / Et le mien quand ton bras vient de m’assassiner / M’ordonne de te plaindre et de te pardonner.’ In the second letter, Proust says that he will be a bad editor because he cried so much reading the letters that his eyes are not clear for typography, adding that he no longer cries just for Bénac and his wife, but also for an unknown friend whom he would have liked to get to know. He greatly praises André’s ability to evoke the senses in the third and fourth letters and speaks again of his immense sorrow at not having had the chance to meet André. In the final letter, Proust notes that he regrets disagreeing with Bénac two months earlier. He writes that after the war, there will be a whole genre of war literature where André risks being drowned, adding that his literary works were not sufficiently original to reveal his personality due to his young age.

The commonplace book contains philisophical writings by Voltaire, Sterne, and other on marriage, avarice, revenge, humility.