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Updated: June 13, 2025
In that very important department of literature which stands midway between Belles Lettres and Science, the department of History, the century cannot indeed claim such striking and popularly effective innovations as in the departments of prose fiction and of periodical writing.
Over the most capricious operations of the lettres de cachet there still hovered some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for something. It was the discovery of a later social science that men who cannot be punished can still be imprisoned.
Comte Paul Vasili, in his charming Lettres inédites to a young diplomatist, first published in the pages of La Nouvelle Revue, gives such an exact picture of the Spanish people, of whom he had so wide an experience and such intimate knowledge, that I am tempted to quote it in full.
Compare Jeremy Taylor's Measures and Offices of Friendship, ch. i. 4. In the first two editions 'from this amiable and pleasing subject. Acts of the Apostles, ix. i. See ante, ii. 82. If any of my readers are disturbed by this thorny question, I beg leave to recommend, to them Letter 69 of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes; and the late Mr. John Palmer of Islington's Answer to Dr.
This is the people alone the mighte haue glorified in the wisedome, and vnmedled puritie of Language, as beinge of all other the firste. This is the people that was mother of lettres, and sciences. Amonge these remained the knowledge of the onely and euerliuinge God, and the certeintie of the religion that was pleasaunte in his eies.
It was essentially a scientific problem awaiting solution; and it is not surprising that the French, quick-brained, inquisitive, eager in pursuit of ideas, should have been active in this field. Their intellectual concern with South Sea discovery may be said to date from the publication of the Petites Lettres of Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.
Monsieur had more dignity of demeanour than the King; but his corpulence rendered his gait inelegant. He was fond of pageantry and magnificence. He cultivated the belles lettres, and under assumed names often contributed verses to the Mercury and other papers. His wonderful memory was the handmaid of his wit, furnishing him with the happiest quotations.
Floggings and scourgings will be universal, lettres de cachet an institution. Why not? Where the god has no sense of justice, why should man? Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of victims will perish at the stake and in the flames in atrocious agony because they are wizards or witches or have had dealings with imaginary devils. Why not? The god does worse than all this.
Where is the Italian who is pleased with the effrontery and the insolence of the hotel-waiters in Italy? In my days, people did not know in France what it was to overcharge; it was truly the home of foreigners. True, they had the unpleasantness of often witnessing acts of odious despotism, 'lettres de cachet', etc.; it was the despotism of a king.
Such impressions ramify very widely, and masque themselves very subtly, in historical works written in the modern fashion; but I find the trace of their presence in the domain of jurisprudence in the praise which is frequently bestowed on the little apologue of Montesquieu concerning the Troglodytes, inserted in the Lettres Persanes.
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