This last was
much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle
--as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as
worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a
large black seal, bearing the D-- cipher very conspicuously, and was
addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D--, the minister, himself.
It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into
one of the upper divisions of the rack.
"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be
that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all
appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect
had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and
black, with the D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the
ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the address, to the Minister, was
diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a certain
royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone
formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of
these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and
torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true
methodical habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude
the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document;
these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this
document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in
accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived;
these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in
one who came with the intention to suspect.
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