Steamy love letters sent to captured French sailors have been opened for the first time in 265 years

Mon, 11/06/2023 - 19:01

A topshot shows a pile of ancient handwritten letters, wrapped in ribbons, laid out on a table. — A picture shows love letters sent to capture French sailors, that had gone unread for 265 years.
The National Archives / Renaud Morieux

Love letters sent to French sailors have been opened for the first time in 265 years.
They contain intimate messages sent during the Seven Years' War between 1756 and 1763.
The letters got "agonizingly close" to reaching the soldiers, before being seized by officials.

In a steamy letter sent more than two centuries ago, Anne Le Cerf wrote to her husband, an imprisoned French naval officer, that she could not "wait to possess" him.

"I embrace you with my heart, being unable to do it with my lips," wrote another wife to her husband, Jean Baptiste Emmanuel Gilbert, a master calker on the Galatée, a captured French warship.