This is how sweet (and vulgar) love letters were 265 years ago

These words come from a letter from Marie Dubosc to her imprisoned husband Louis Chambrelan.

Chambrelan was a prisoner of war in the Seven Years’ War, which was fought from 1756 to 1763. On one side were fighting Prussia and Great Britain, and on the other side was an alliance of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire and France, Russia and Spain. It was about dominance in America and India, control of the transatlantic sea routes and trade advantages.

Like Chambrelan, many POWs received countless love letters from their wives. However, these never reached the prisoners because they were intercepted by the guards and kept unopened. One hundred of the letters have now been opened and scientifically examined for the first time.

Renaud Morieux from the University of Cambridge’s history faculty took on the task. He was the first person in 265 years to open the letters for research purposes. “It was a very emotional moment for me,” the historian said. This was because he had the opportunity to read something that the intended recipients had never seen.

Morieux deciphered 102 letters from the British National Archives in London. He suffered from clumsy handwriting, a lack of punctuation and a lack of spelling. He now has the results in the trade journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales published.

Here is an overview of the most beautiful (and vulgar) love confessions from the 18th century:

Marie Dubosc wrote these lines in 1758. The letter was intended to reach her husband Louis Chambrelan, a lieutenant on the Galatée. But the letter never arrived and Marie never saw her lover again. She died a year later in Le Havre, before Louis Chambrelan was released from captivity.

Anne le Cerf wrote this sentence to her husband Jean Topsent. Morieux couldn’t determine whether by “own” she meant a hug or sex.

However, it wasn’t just confessions of love that went around:

Marguerite Quesnel wrote this letter to her son Nicolas. In it she accused the sailor of not having written her letters. Shortly afterwards, Nicolas’ fiancée sent him a letter urging him to respond to his mother.

Although France had the best ships at the time, they lacked skilled sailors. England took advantage of this and captured as many French sailors as possible.

As early as 1758, of the 60,137 French sailors, almost a third were imprisoned in Britain.