The manuscript is a lettre en vers in the hand of Paul Desforges-Maillard, featuring seven poems. The author, praising Voltaire’s formidable superiority of intellect and character, implicitly urges his addressee to help him secure employment. The letter cites and refers to De rerum natura by Lucretius and Œdipe by Corneille.

Flaubert writes that he is better, but not fully recovered, adding that sometimes prostrations occur to him where it seems that he is going to die which leave him feeling destroyed. He then notes that he wrote six pages of his La Légende de Saint-Julien, and read a little of Saint-Simon, as well as rereading for the thousandth time the tales of Voltaire. Flaubert then engages in a brief study of morals and comments on the legal affairs of Quimper and the Breton weather.