Since the nineteenth century, Manzoni criticism has assiduously investigated the norms and procedures adopted by the author in order to identify and enrich this ‘Italian’ language while he proceeded in the three drafts of I promessi sposi.Among these three different drafts, the third is particularly noteworthy to this study, that is the period that marks the passage from the ‘ventisettana’ to the ‘quarantana’. Interestingly, notwithstanding the extremely accurate analysis of the corrections on the ‘ventisettana’ by critics and philologists, no attention has been paid to the influences exercised by the earliest French translations of IPS on the definitive edition . Given the significant developments in translation studies, and I refer in particular to the theories regarding the polysystem and the translator’s invisibility, this fact sheds new light and is worthy to be explored. The earliest translations in French, entitled Les fiancés, – two of which appeared in early 1828, the first by M. Rey-Dussueil and the second by P-J. Gosselin, and a third in 1832 by the Marquis de Montgrand –, suggested a wide range of possible textual variations to Manzoni, at the lexico-grammatical-syntactic-semantic and stylistic levels
