In Literature
- Honoré Mirabeau, Des Lettres de Cachet et des prisons d'état (Hamburg, 1782), written in the dungeon at Vincennes into which his father had thrown him by a lettre de cachet, one of the ablest and most eloquent of his works, which had an immense circulation and was translated into English in 1788.
- Dr. Manette, in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, was thrown into the Bastille prison by means of a lettre de cachet. In addition, Charles Darnay suspected that his uncle, a marquis, would have used a lettre de cachet to throw Darnay in prison if it weren't for the fact that the Marquis had fallen out of favour with the Court.
- In Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, d'Artagnan escapes prosecution for the death of Milady by means of an ambiguously worded lettre de cachet given to Milady for her own use by the Cardinal de Richelieu.
- Thomas, D. "The Marquis de Sade". (1992) de Sade's mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil obtained multiple lettres de cachet to ensure de Sade's continuous imprisonment in the Bastille and Charenton.
Read more about this topic: Lettre De Cachet
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)