"In French history, a letter or order under seal; a private
letter of state: a name given especially to a written order
proceeding from and signed by the king, and countersigned by a
secretary of state, and used at first as an occasional means
of delaying the course of justice, but later, in the 17th and
18th centuries, as a warrant for the imprisonment without
trial of a person obnoxious for any reason to the government,
often for life or for a long period, and on frivolous
pretexts. Lettres de cachet were abolished at the Revolution."
_Century Dictionary._
"The minister used to give generously blank lettres-de-cachet
to the intendants, the bishops, and people in the
administration. Saint-Florentin, alone, gave away as many as
50,000. Never had man's dearest treasure, liberty, been more
lavishly squandered. These letters were the object of a
profitable traffic; they were sold to fathers who wanted to
get rid of their sons, and given to pretty women who were
inconvenienced by their husbands. This last cause of
imprisonment was one of the most prominent. And all through
good-nature. The king [Louis XV.] was too good to refuse a
lettre-de-cachet to a great lord. The intendant was too
good-natured not to grant one at a lady's request. The
government clerks, the mistresses of the clerks, and the
friends of these mistresses, through good-nature, civility, or
mere politeness, obtained, gave, or lent, those terrible
orders by which a man was buried alive. Buried;—for such was
the carelessness and levity of those amiable clerks,—almost
all nobles, fashionable men, all occupied with their
pleasures,—that they never had the time, when once the poor
fellow was shut up, to think of his position."
_J. Michelet,
Historical View of the French Revolution,
introduction, part 2, section 9._