Among the correspondence in French that Catherine II conducted with men and women of the literary world, her exchange of letters with F. M. Grimm over a period of more than twenty years stands out by virtue of the trust and closeness that were immediately established between the two of them. It was only to Grimm that she could declare, on 2 (13) October 1780: ‘I write to you about everything that goes through my mind, with no rule or order, without good style or proper spelling […]’ (SIRIO 1878: 191–2); or again, on 2 (13) March 1778: ‘with you I chatter, I never write […] I prefer to enjoy myself and set my hand free’ (1878: 83). These letters were not read through by a francophone secretary or preceded by a rough version, whereas the draft of a letter such as that of 29 May/ 9 June 1767 to Voltaire has scarcely a single line without corrections. The point is that letters addressed to d'Alembert, Voltaire or Marmontel were intended to show Catherine in a good light: some of them were immediately published and others were passed around or commented upon in salons and correspondence. It was more or less the same when Catherine wrote to her ‘friend’ Mme Geoffrin, whose salon was the place where the aristocracy of a good part of Europe and princes or sovereigns could meet celebrities from the world of letters (Lilti 2005: 143, 386–7, 390). In the literary arena too the empress had her reputation to maintain. After all, Voltaire wrote, in 1766, as he praised the style of a note by Stanisław Poniatowski, that he knew ‘three crowned heads of the North who would be a credit to our Academy, the Empress of Russia, the King of Poland and the King of Prussia’.

The concern of the empress for her public image had no effect on the form of her letters to Grimm. These letters therefore provide an exceptional set of data with which to analyse the spontaneous way Catherine used French in the course of a very private epistolary relationship.