The ink has barely faded and the paper is only slightly yellowed. For almost 250 years the letters, more than a hundred of them, lay sealed in the British National Archives, unopened and unexamined, until a history professor came across them. To his delight, he found a treasure trove of intimate details about romance and daily life in mid-18th century France.
Unlike many other written documents of the time, most of the letters were written by women – the mothers, fiancées and sisters of French sailors whose warship, the Galatée, was captured by the British Navy on April 8, 1758. Some letters contained accounts of women pining for their husbands at war, while others had discussions about household finances, the birth of a child, or expressions of resentment toward sailors who had fallen out of touch.
Renaud Morieux, professor of European history at the University of Cambridge who discovered the collection of letters in 2004, said he asked an archivist if he could examine the contents of a box just out of curiosity while he was doing research at the National Archives in southwest London .
In the box Dr. found Morieux three bundles of letters. Only three of the letters had been opened, most likely by a lower-ranking clerk, shortly after the British Navy received them from France. The clerk may not have inspected them further and stored them, where they were forgotten.
Dr. Morieux spent five months studying the letters, which were folded into envelopes and sealed with red wax seals. The script was scribbled on high-quality paper and was often littered with spelling errors. Busy writing a book and other research projects, Dr. Morieux this week, almost twenty years after the discovery of the letters, published his findings in the French academic journal Annales. History, Social Sciences.
In one letter, a woman named Anne Le Cerf wrote to her husband, a petty officer on the ship, saying she couldn’t wait to “possess” him, using a word meaning “embrace” or “make love.” could have meant. Mrs. Le Cerf signed the letter “your obedient wife, Nanette,” with an affectionate nickname. Her husband, Jean Topsent, who was imprisoned in England at the time, never received the letter.
In another letter, a woman writes to her husband that she could write to him all night, but “I wouldn’t have room to draw.” The woman, Marie Dubosc, concluded by saying it was midnight and time for her to rest. Mrs. Dubosc’s husband, the first lieutenant of the Galatée, Louis Chambrelan, never received the letter and they would never meet again. Mrs. Dubosc died the following year in Le Havre, France.
Writing letters was a popular pastime in the 18th century, especially love letters to those at war far away. Rebecca Earle, professor of history at the University of Warwick, said what made this collection of letters remarkable was that they provided a rare insight into the personal lives of people in 18th-century France.
“It’s really hard to get into the emotional fabric of the marriages and personal lives of ordinary people in the past,” said Dr. Earle. “That is very difficult for historians to capture.” She said the letters added to growing evidence that 18th-century women were not always shy about expressing their intimate desires to their partners.
And it wasn’t just their partners who would have read them. Dr. Morieux said many of the people who sent the letters could not read or write, so they dictated what they wanted to say to a writer.
In another letter, Marguerite Lemoyne, the mother of a sailor, Nicolas Quesnel, wrote to her son: “I think of you more than you think of me.” She asked him to give his regards to his shipmate Varin, as “only his wife tells me your news.” Two months later, in February 1758, Mr. Quesnel’s fiancée, Marianne, urged him in a letter to write to his mother more often.
These letters were written during the Seven Years’ War, which lasted from 1756 to 1763, and is often described as the first global conflict. During the war, which pitted Britain and Prussia against France, Austria and Spain, Britain imprisoned more than 64,000 French sailors.
The French postal administration had tried to deliver the letters to several ports in France, but each time the Galatée had already left. When French authorities heard that the ship, which sailed from Bordeaux to Quebec, had been captured by the British Navy, they sent the letters to London. The captured ship was taken to Plymouth, England, where the sailors disembarked and were sent to prison.
Dr. Morieux said he found it emotional to be the first person to read such messages, full of sadness and intimacy, that did not reach their intended recipients. In one letter, a woman writes to her brother, a sailor, that their parents have died. She urges him not to be too sad, noting that only “death is certain.”