Lettre de cachet

“ And yet it is a weighty matter—a maze of difficulties, a labyrinth of conflicting circumstances. If Mademoiselle Clotilde does not care for Monsieur Isidore after all, and he loves Mademoiselle Marguerite, and has actually plighted his word to her, what master-stroke of policy can even the genius of M. Jasmin devise to overcome such obstacles?"
The valet's wits were too blunted to detect the irony, but he drank in the flattery as he sipped his wine. "Bah!" replied he, "our young master can have his choice between a union with Mademoiselle Clotilde or a lettre de cachet ”

“ I therefore venture to appeal to your bounty in behalf of the church of Cuiseaux,” etc.
The exalted lady had no sooner cast her eyes upon the poor priest’s unlucky exordium, than she flew into a rage, and had him thrown into prison, whence it was with great difficulty that his friends procured a release. The story seems apocryphal, but the memorial bears the following indorsement in the handwriting of Madame de Maintenon:—The lieutenant of police is ordered to issue a lettre-de-cachet against the signer of this petition.
Sonnets. WRITING A SONNET.
Doris, the fair, a sonnet needs must have ”

“ Lettres de cachet were abolished at the Revolution." Century Dictionary. "The minister used to give generously blank lettres-de-cachet to the intendants, the bishops, and people in the administration. Saint-Florentin, alone, gave away as many as 50,000. Never had man's dearest treasure, liberty, been more lavishly squandered. These letters were the object of a profitable traffic; they were sold to fathers who wanted to get rid of their sons, and given to pretty women who were inconvenienced by their husbands. ”

“ It is a possible cry from any human being to another. Then as to the ring and the photograph, we have no proof that he put them in the envelope. They may have been found on him and put into the envelope by the same hand that addressed it. I quite grant you that those few words are extraordinary, but they can be explained. But even if it were obvious that they were intended for somebody else, you cannot deduce from that, that another letter, intended for Lady Rose and containing a will, was sent elsewhere. ”

“ Bothwell, in his turn, was nothing loath, and they leaped at each other like two flames.
It was then that Mary wrote those letters which were afterward discovered in a casket and which were used against her when she was on trial for her life. These so-called Casket Letters, though we have not now the originals, are among the most extraordinary letters ever written. All shame, all hesitation, all innocence, are flung away in them. The writer is so fired with passion that each sentence is like a cry to a lover in the dark. ”

“ It was quite by accident that he found the diary. Reading it, to learn if it was his duty, as a friend who knew its probable secrets, to destroy it, he thus had found out about the lawyer’s trickery. But instead of writing and telling the granddaughter who he was and why she ought to be in the big house when the will was read, he worded his letter so crazy-like, with such queer reference to the dead man’s diary, that the letter frightened her. ”

“ No: on my honor I ask for no letter of yours— not a word that has been written by you or to you. That packet contains a stolen letter: a letter written by a woman to a man—a man not her husband—a letter that means disgrace, infamy—
NAPOLEON. A love letter?
LADY (bitter-sweetly) . What else but a love letter could stir up so much hate?
NAPOLEON. Why is it sent to me? To put the husband in my power,– eh?
LADY. No, no: it can be of no use to you: I swear that it will cost you nothing to give it to me. It has been sent to you out of sheer malice—solely to injure the woman who wrote it. ”

“ But I should think that you will nave the good sense to be resigned to a misfortune, doubtless very great, but to which I am a stranger.' 'But, sir, I am a mother; if my fortune is lost to me, my daughter and myself have only the resource of some little furniture; that sold, there remains but misery, sir, appalling misery!' 'You have, unfortunately, been cheated; I can do nothing,' replied the notary. ”

“ One thing more I will do, to turn aside all suspicion of suicide. I will write a letter to some person who does not exist, a letter which will make it appear as if I were in excellent humour and planning for the future. ”

“ Quoth she, "Take the answer to thy letter." He took it and reading it, wept with sore weeping and said, "I long for some one to slay me at this moment and send me to my rest, for indeed death were easier to me than this my state!" Then he took ink case and pen and paper and wrote a letter containing these two couplets,
"O hope of me! pursue me not with rigour and disdain: * Deign thou to visit lover wight in love of thee is drowned; Deem not a life so deeply wronged I longer will endure; * My soul for severance from my friend divorced this frame unsound." ”

“ What was there in these letters? The vilest treason of which a man has ever been the victim. The writer of these letters was one of my intimate friends! And the tone in which they were written!—what passion, what love, certain of being returned! How he spoke of 'keeping the secret!' And all these letters dated at a time when I was married and so happy! How can I tell you what I felt? Imagine the intoxication caused by a mortal poison. I read all those letters every one. Then I put them up again in a packet, retied them with the ribbon, and, replacing them under the lace, relocked the drawer. ”

“ As one of its penalties, letter writing has become a lost art. A three-line note or a postal card, or what is worse, a dictation by a stenographer from which the last vestige of communion of friend with friend is completely extinguished, has taken the place of the welcome epistles which our grandmothers and aunts wrote with care, and filled full not only with gossip and family news, but also with instructive comments on events of the day. ”

“ Until your letter came, dear, I'd been sitting here in the half dark and thinking where I could go and ever forget you; abroad, perhaps, to drift through Italy or Spain and dream away the pain of having lost you where the crumbling ruins of older, mellower civilizations would mirror only the desolation of my heart—and then your letter came. ”

“ I will refrain from asserting that a daily correspondence, maintained with a large variety of persons—people who may not perhaps be scientific, but who understand whether a letter is well written or ridiculous—may be capable of securing a large part of the regard, or of occasioning a large part of the contempt, bestowed on nobles. I make no mention of the rich man in Signor Mercier's comedy of Indigence, who found it impossible to write a letter of the utmost importance because his secretary was away from home. ”

“ It seems that we have gone so far, and been through so much, and only to come amongst strangers at last; and we cannot even hope to find a letter, or a word about anybody we care for, but are still to go farther and hear less. It is horrid, and makes me feel utterly desperate at times. It is clearly not quite so good as being dead, as that is a separation without oblivion ”

“ It was announced this morning that no more letters from our Corps would be accepted at the Army Post Office. This is the most certain sign we have had that an attack is going to be pulled off. Letters home are a frequent source of leakage of information. When men know that they are writing what may prove to be their last message to their mothers, wives, sweethearts, it is almost impossible for them to keep that knowledge to themselves. ”

“ Lone and defenceless as we were, thy wife and child, with but one attendant I feared him not; but I trembled at thy return, for I knew that thou went a Spaniard, a Castilian, and that beneath thy calm and gentle seeming lurked pride, and jealousy, and revenge. Thy letter came, the only letter since thy absence, the last letter from thee I may ever weep over, and lay upon my heart. Thy relation was dead, and his wealth enriched a nearer heir. Thou wert to return. The day in which I might expect thee approached—it arrived. ”

“ Of all secret crimes buried in the mystery of private life, the most disgraceful is that of breaking the seal of a letter, or of reading it surreptitiously. Every one, whoever it may be, and urged by whatever reason, who is guilty of such an act has stained his honor beyond retrieving. ”

“ Now they had been tossed down helter-skelter among the rubbish there on the floor, and had themselves turned to rubbish like the rest. Yes, there lay her life at her feet, among all that tarnished trash.
She picked up her letters, ten in all, and examined the flaps of the envelops. Not one had been opened—not one. As she looked, every word she had written fluttered to life, and every feeling prompting it sent a tremor through her. ”

“ I ungratefully wished that if I was to be allowed news of the outside world it might have been an item connected with my more immediate belongings. But the letter gave me a pleasure difficult to describe, bringing, as it did, a ventilating whiff of ordinary human, free existence into prison life. I clung to every particle of it, envelope and all, and generally carried it about in my clothes for fear it should be destroyed while I was out of my cell; no love-letter was ever more watchfully guarded by a girl of sixteen. ”

“ She would fain cast upon another the odium of those misfortunes for which she alone is answerable. Her letter is violent, sometimes abusive, and that of you!—you, to whom she is under obligations which are greater even than her faults, but to whose advice she wickedly imputes all the sufferings of her much-injured daughter, the late Lady Belmont. The chief purport of her writing I will acquaint you with; the letter itself is not worthy your notice. ”

“ But the man having been unmarried, he gradually dropped out of remembrance, and as my grandfather never allowed the subject to be mentioned in his presence, I should probably never have known anything about it but for the vague tradition which always attaches to such events, and for this fact, that after my grandfather’s death, a letter came addressed to him from somewhere in the United States from some one—the name different from that of the keeper—but alluding to the past, and implying the presence of a common secret, and, of course, with it came a request for money. ”

“ You so well describe your brother's grave lecturing letter, that you make me ashamed of part of mine. I would fain re-write it, leaving out my 'sage advice'; but if I begin another letter something may fall out to prevent me from finishing it, and, therefore, skip over it as well as you can; it shall be the last I ever send you.
"It is well enough when one is talking to a friend to hedge in an odd word by way of counsel now and then; but there is something mighty irksome in its staring upon one in a letter, where one ought only to see kind words and friendly remembrances. ”

“ If your father, even, should call upon him it would create suspicion. So I am going to ask you to carry this letter to the address written on the envelope, and you must give it into his own hands to-night. Not even your own father will know that you have this letter; so if he should be questioned or watched he will be able to deny knowing of its existence. ”

“ And so the hiding-place of the casket and the jewels is hidden in the clock for no man to guess unless he be such a man as da Sestos–one who has something of the very madness of desire and cunning that possessed the goldsmith. ”

“ He cannot hold out against a surprise. The word, by which you will know your friends, is
Counterfeit."
"Ah, ha!" thought I, "this is more like it." And moved by a sudden impulse, I hastily copied the letter into my memorandum-book, and then returning to the original, scratched out with my penknife the word northeast and carefully substituting that of southwest put the letter back into the box, in the hope that when he came to consult the envelope in his pocket (as he would be sure to do sooner or later) he would miss its contents and return to the post-office in search of it. ”

“ For a man to forget where the postage stamps are kept, or the position in the room of the letter files, was, in itself, a proof that something very strange had suddenly come over him, the more so in the case of one who was almost aggressively proud of his memory. ”

“ But I know that, painful and severe as the blow must prove, it is much better that the worst should be told, in a direct and certain form, by letter, than to have your feelings tortured unnecessarily by the uncertain reports which could not fail to reach you through the newspapers. ”

“ She knew that even yet there was a constant longing, a half-unconscious daily looking for of news of the wanderer as the mail came in, followed each time by renewed disappointment, and that often the poor, weary heart grew sick indeed with hope deferred. ”

“ An anonymous letter concerning some matter of vital importance to the recipient will rarely leave him at ease until events have adduced their final evidence on one side or the other; mystery wholly impenetrable will often exert a moral influence which no lucidity of argument, no open appeal, could ever have attained. ”

“ We all have these instincts at times: the contents of an unopened letter or parcel seem endowed with a voice; who has not guessed the fateful news in a telegram before he has broken open the envelope, even as Leavesley guessed the contents of the letter in his hand? ”

“ For although many hearts are made glad by these silent messengers, yet in every day's mail there is enough of sadness and misery, lying torpid like serpents, until warmed into venomous life by a glance of the eye, to cast a gloom over the spirits of any one who should know it all ”