"'MADAM,--Two pigeons used to come every day to pick grains out of my straw; I kept them, and they gave me young ones. I venture to take the liberty of presenting you with this pair as a mark of my respect and affection. I beseech you in mercy to be good enough to accept them, with as much pleasure as I have in offering them to you. I have the honour to be, with the profoundest respect, Madam, your very humble and obedient servant, "'DANRY, for eleven years at the Bastille.'" Why did not Danry always make so charming a use of the permission accorded him to write to the minister, the lieutenant of police, Madame de Pompadour, Dr. Quesnay, and his mother? He wrote incessantly, and we have letters of his in hundreds, widely differing one from another. Some are suppliant and pathetic: "My body is wasting away every day in tears and blood, I am worn out." He writes to Madame de Pompadour:--"Madam,--I have never wished you anything but well; be then sensible to the voice of tears, of my innocence, and of a poor despairing mother of sixty-six years. Madam, you are well aware of my martyrdom. I beg you in God's name to grant me my precious liberty; I am spent, I am dying, my blood is all on fire by reason of my groaning; twenty times in the night I am obliged to moisten my mouth and nostrils to get my breath." Everyone knows the famous letter beginning with the words, "I have been suffering now for 100,000 hours." He writes to Quesnay: "I present myself to you with a live coal upon my head, indicating my pressing necessity." The images he uses are not always so happy: "Listen," he says to Berryer, "to the voice of the just bowels with which you are arrayed"! In other letters the prisoner alters his tone; to plaints succeed cries of rage and fury, "he steeps his pen in the gall with which his soul is saturated." He no longer supplicates, he threatens. There is nothing to praise in the style of these epistles: it is incorrect and vulgar, though at times vigorous and coloured with vivid imagery. To the lieutenant of police he writes: "When a man is to be punished in this accursed prison, the air is full of it, the punishments fall quicker than the thunderbolt; but when it is a case of succouring a man who is unfortunate, I see nothing but crabs;" and he addresses to him these lines of Voltaire:-- "Perish those villains born, whose hearts of steel No touch of ruth for others' woes can feel."