What distinguishes the private epitext from the public epitext is not exactly that in the former the author is not aiming at the public and therefore does not have publication in view: many letters and many journal pages are written with clear foreknowledge of their publication to come, and undoubtedly this pre-science does not affect the writing of these letters and journals in a way that undermines their private – indeed, intimate – character. For us, what will define this character is the presence of a first addressee interposed between the author and the possible public, an addressee (a correspondent, a confidant, the author himself) who is perceived not as just an intermediary or functionally transparent relay, a media “nonperson,” but indeed as a full-fledged addressee, one whom the author addresses for that person's own sake even if the author's ulterior motive is to let the public subsequently stand witness to this interlocution. In the public epitext, the author addresses the public, possibly through an intermediary; in the private epitext, the author first addresses a confidant who is real, who is perceived as such, and whose personality is important to the communication at hand, even influencing its form and content. So much so that at the other end of the chain, when the public – eventually admitted to this confidential or intimate exchange – learns, always after the fact, about a message that is not addressed essentially to it, it does so “over the shoulder” of a third party who is genuinely treated as an individual person.