SAINTPLUME

A History of Fatal Correspondence

By M.A. — Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

In the quiet corridors of history, words have killed more surely than swords. Some were carried by diplomats, others by lovers...but a few letters bore venom not just in their prose, but in their ink.

Long before encrypted messages and diplomatic cables, the written word traveled slowly, carried by trembling hands across borders and battlefields. It was a dangerous business, both for what was said and what was unsaid—and in rare, ruthless instances, for what was unseen. The poisoned letter, a weapon at once intimate and unsparing, blurred the line between court intrigue and assassination.

In Renaissance Italy, where ink and intrigue flowed with equal ease, Catherine de' Medici’s court became infamous for its whispered poisons. Apothecaries and perfumers—masters of volatile substances—supplied her ladies-in-waiting with cosmetics, perfumes, and sometimes, inks laced with deadly tinctures. Rumors held that political rivals received letters that left them pale, feverish, and dead within days, the toxin absorbed through the skin as they handled their correspondence.

The technique traveled. In 17th-century Russia, boyars at the court of Ivan the Terrible spoke in hushed tones of “black letters”: missives stained with herbal poisons like aconite and belladonna. The Tsar’s oprichniki, loyal enforcers clad in black, reportedly dispatched these fatal notes to dissenters, their victims dying before they could raise an accusation. In a land where speech was already treacherous, written words could turn fatal.

The practice saw a decadent revival in 18th-century France. Amid the powdered wigs and courtly rivalries of Versailles, poisons became the weapon of the desperate and the scorned. The infamous Affair of the Poisons (1677–1682) unearthed a web of sorcerers, fortune tellers, and mistresses, many of whom confessed to smuggling toxins in love letters. Invisible inks made of arsenic or mercury sulfide delivered death under the guise of devotion, sometimes in scented paper folded just so.

Even in the modern era, the deadly letter lingered. In 1894, Belle Époque Paris was rocked by the discovery of a series of anonymous poison-ink letters sent to prominent figures. The ink, a delicate mixture of prussic acid and crushed belladonna, dried clear but released toxic fumes upon exposure to the warmth of a reading candle. Police never apprehended the culprit—or culprits—but society papers breathlessly dubbed it “the Parisian Death Script.”

These stories remind us that diplomacy and desire, jealousy and ambition, have always traveled in the guise of civility. The pen may be mightier than the sword, and at times, far deadlier.

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