Lettre de Cachet - in Literature

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.

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