these forms against their husbands, husbands against their wives, fathers against their children, men-about-town against their rivals in love, debtors against their creditors, opera-dancers against the lovers who had slighted them. If one but had the ear of the King, or the King's mistress, or the King's minister, or the King's chief of police, or of a friend or a friend's friend of any of these potentates, there was no grudge, jealousy, or enmity which one might not satisfy by means of a _lettre de cachet_,—that instrument which was so sure a safegard against the "errors and abuses" of imprisonment, because it carried the signature of the King and his minister! And the cases in which these scraps of paper were used merely for the ruin, the torment, or the temporary defeat of a private enemy, often had the cruelest results. The enemy and the enmity were forgotten, but the _lettre de cachet_ had not been cancelled, and the prisoner still bided his day. Persons who had never been convicted of crimes, and other persons who had never been guilty of crimes, lay for years in the Bastille, forgotten and uncared for. "There are prisoners who remain in the Bastille," said Linguet (who spent two years there), "not because anybody is particularly anxious that they should remain, but because they happen to be there and have been forgotten, and there is nobody to ask for their release." Captain Bingham, the English apologist of the Bastille, discussing the cases of certain criminals who were arbitrarily dealt with by _lettres de cachet_, says that in England at the present day they "would be prosecuted according to law, and most probably committed to prison." Very good! But is there no difference between the situation of the criminal who, after conviction in open court, is sent to prison for a fixed term of weeks, months, or years, and that of the "criminal" who goes to prison uncondemned and untried, and who cannot gauge the length of his imprisonment? Far enough from being "not so easy" to get into the Bastille, the passage across those two drawbridges and through those five massy gates was only too dreadfully simple for all who were furnished against their wills with the "open sesame" of the _lettre de cachet_.