The nine hands in the Fronde newsletters

Return to the opening page of Fronde newsletters
For more on these newsletters, see the hypotheses about "Monsieur X"

Georges Dethan provided me with photocopies of similar newsletters of the period preserved the records of the Archives des Affaires étrangères, at the Quay d'Orsay. None of hands shown below were among them. I subsequently spent several days going through every sheet in the volumes for 1648-1653; but, again, there were no matches. In other words, Monsieur X does not appear to have had an entrée to the royal minister for foreign affairs. (My apologies for the "scratches" in the scans.)
Note: In the newletters, Hands #3 to #9 are set in Times Roman, to distinguish these copyists from "Monsieur X."

Hand # 1 Monsieur X's modern "bastard" hand

This very avant-garde italic script, known as the "bâtarde" script, is the principal hand in the newsletters. Only a decade earlier this script had been developed by the maîtres écrvains of Paris at the request of the Parlement de Paris (see Poésie & calligraphie imprimée à Paris au XVIIe siècle, Paris: Bibliothèque mazarine, 2004). In other words, Monsieur X was demonstrating his modernity by using this hand. When in a hurry, he would however allow a few letters from the more traditional script described as "ronde" to creep into his writing (see Hand # 2). And he also used Hand #2 to correct the mistakes he himself had made while copying in Hand # 1! Most of these changes involve modernizations, often by crossing out a superfluous letter. Sometimes he adds or changes a word, more often than not owing to what seems to be a copying error. Monsieur X slowly modernizes his spelling as the weeks pass. For example, his confusion of ce and se becomes less frequent, and he begins to write cette ville instead of ceste ville. The texts copied out in Hand # 1 have some noteworthy idiosyncrasies, especially his spelling of the third-person-plural end of imperfect verbs: he writes -oint rather than -oient, and his frequent omission of the u after a q: quelq'unes, q'ung, and so forth. His confusion of ce and se, and of qu'il and qui, may suggest that someone was dictating to him. (Circa 1650 many people did not sound the L of il.)

Hand # 2 Monsieur X's hasty "round" hand

In a few quite personal passages, Monsieur X is less self-conscious about using the new "bastard" script and allows elements of the older "round" script to surface. These hastily-written passages were tacked on at the ends of newsletters dated September 9, and December 30, 1650, and January 13, 1651 (5-295v; 5-345; and 5-352-352v).

It is clear that Monsieur X's contribution to the newsletters went beyond simple copying: in these three letters, he is caught composing as he wrote. Take, for example, a cross-out in his own hand, where "il jouysse jamais d'une paix" is modified to read "il jouysse jamais d'une parfaitte tranquillitté" (5-345):

Hand # 3

This scribe wrote one entire newsletter dated January 22, 1949 (5-19-20v).

Hand # 4

This copyist wrote one newsletter dated April 30, 1649 (5-25-27v).

Hand # 5

This rather stiff hand is found in two successive letters dated September 9 and 10, 1649 (5-87-93v). The scribe also wrote the first two lines of the next letter, September 17, 1649 (5-95) and on the final sheets of that same letter (5-97-98).