Sleuths read old letters trapped in her breasts without opening them

On July 31st In 1697, Jacques Sennacques sent a letter to his cousin — a Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant living in The Hague — begging him, for the love of Pete (who is paraphrased), to send him a certificate. of death of his relative, Daniel Le Pers. . In a dreaded seventeenth-century version of the dreaded “according to my previous e-mail,” Sennacques wrote, “I am writing to you a second time to remind you of the pains I took on your behalf.” Basically, you owe me a favor and I’ve come to charge.

Sennacques dropped the pen and folded the letter intricately, turning it into his own envelope. Today, historians call this technique “letter blocking.” In Sennacques’ time, people had created a galaxy of different ways of folding their letters, some so characteristic, in fact, that they acted as a kind of signature for the sender. They didn’t do it because they wanted to save money on envelopes, mind you, but because they wanted privacy. By folding the paper and putting corners, they could arrange it so that to open the correspondence the reader would have to tear it in certain places. If the intended recipient opened the letter and found it already torn, he would know that espionage had entered. They could tear off whole pieces of paper, so that if they opened the letter and did not feel or feel any tear, even though a piece of it was still falling, they would know that they were not the first person to read its contents.

It was the version of one of the seals of the first modern period that voids the warranty of a device if it breaks. Unlike the self-destructive messages of Mission impossible, you could still read a torn letter, and if you knew the technique of the person who sent it to you, you might even know tricks to avoid tearing it. However, the blockade of letters set traps that exposed the spies.

Unfortunately for all parties involved, Sennacques’ second letter never reached his trading cousin. Instead, it ended up in a trunk, known as the Brienne Collection, which contains 2,600 letters sent between 1689 and 1706 from all over Europe to The Hague. Sennacques’s letter is one of hundreds that remain unopened, folded firmly on itself.

How do we know, then, that the man lost patience with his cousin? Writing in the magazine today Communications on nature, the researchers describe how they used an advanced 3D imaging technique — originally designed to map the mineral content of teeth — to scan four old letters from the Brienne Collection to display them virtually, without tearing. . “The letters in his trunk are so poignant that they tell such important stories about family, loss and love and religion,” says King’s College London literary historian Daniel Starza Smith, co-author of the newspaper. “But also, what letter blocking does is give us a language to talk about types of security technologies and secrecy of human communication, discretion and privacy.”