Alphonse de FORTIA de PILES (1758–1826). Autograph letter, Sisteron, September 6, 1824, to the Marquis de La Valette in Carpentras; 4 pages, in-4 format, on his printed letterhead with a vignette bearing his monogram and motto, addressed. A long and interesting letter, written in every available space, in which he rails against the poor functioning of the postal service, and especially against the female director who was assigned to him, who makes mistake after mistake. He has, however, been able to read the Queen’s Memoirs and wishes to make corrections to them; one should snap up this work “which the royalist newspapers make no mention of”; he saw, in the *Journal des Débats*, “a highly scathing article by Feletz on Jouy’s new work (*Les ermites en liberté*), you’ll agree that he’s a brazen scoundrel; his comparison of Bonaparte’s navy to that of Louis XVIII would warrant confinement not at Sainte-Pélagie, but at Charenton”… He then turns to the Bausset family, first mentioning Madame de Bausset, a young lady from Jarente and sister of Madame de la Reynière, who fifty years ago was “a woman like few others. “It was impossible to be more amiable or more witty: she wrote like Madame de Sévigné”; he corresponded with her for a long time. He elaborates at length on the family’s history—her husband, the brother of the Bishop of Alès; the “Indian” branch; the Bausset-Roquefort branch; and the younger branch in Marseille—and recounts several anecdotes. He discusses the political situation, the “triumvirate” that governs, and the royal ordinance of August 15 reinstating newspaper censorship: it is indeed “a coup d’état,” and “if the law does not pass, the triumvirate will be toppled for good”…