Lettre de cachet

In literature

• Honoré de 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.
• The Castle of Wolfenbach, one of the "Horrid Novels" mentioned in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, features a lettre de cachet as a major plot point when the main villain, the guardian of a young lady who has run away, tries to use a lettre de cachet to obligate her to be returned to him so he can force her into marriage.
• Doctor Alexandre Manette, in Charles 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 put Darnay himself into prison had the Marquis not fallen out of favour with the royal court.