The MS is bound with three other texts by Voltaire which once formed part of the Boissy d’Anglas album. These texts are:

• (a) a letter in verse to Algarotti and a letter to the comte d’Argental
• (b) Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne
• (c) Bababec et les fakirs / Lettre d’un Turc.

The manuscript is written as if a letter replying to a request for a critique. It analyses in depth a series of points about Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII, roi de Suède, which the critic believes are ‘deficient, redundant, or mistaken’, and provides references to particular pages in the left-hand margins.