1 Here the sergeant observes the principle that someone of higher rank always has to have the last word.
2 Notice to the post office. — This letter, posted from Senlis at ten the previous night, only reached us at our offices at seven in the evening.
3 The term in France was traditionally applied to any place that lay within the territory of the Île-de-France — as opposed to the neighboring regions of Picardy or Soissons. The term is still used to today to designate certain localities.
4 I have no idea what this line means; I refer it to the paleographers.
5 She never mentions La Corbinière by name; it was only through the narrative of Angélique’s cousin, the Celestine monk, that we learned of his identity.
6 This letter that I posted at eleven at night once again arrived the following day at seven in the evening. So I suppose there was nothing out of the ordinary either this time or the previous time, — except for the fact that it takes the post office an eternity to cover a distance of forty kilometers which the stages manage in four hours.
7 This note has been clipped from a sale catalogue. So far we have encountered five different spellings of the name de Bucquoy; here’s the sixth: Busquoy.
8 Hermann, Arminius, or perhaps Hermes.
9 M. Toulouse, rue du Foin-Saint-Jacques, across from the police station.
11 A Protestant branch of the de Bucquoy family in fact existed in the Quercy region.
12 After the storming of the Bastille, most of its archives were transported to the Library of the Arsenal. We hope to find traces of this interrogation among its holdings. This material, however, has lain there unclassified since ’89, even though some progress is currently being made. We shall communicate the result of our research to the public once the library has completed its classification of these archives.
14 Michaud’s Biographie universelle refers to a M. le Premier. The semi-German book in our possession offers this other name.