If you will insist on continuing this correspondence, I must demand you provide if not actual conversation--which I had heard tell was one of your great skills though my own encounters have been less than fully convincing on that point--at least witty tales of your daring exploits that I might marvel at your boldness and then pass along the details to the relevant authorities to see that no precious works of art are destroyed by your cavalier adventuring.
You may continue to reach me via the Inquisition, the Gallows, Kirkwall, for the foreseeable future.
no subject
Lord Dompierre,
You are the very king of tediousness. I can hardly care to guess what the unnamed daughter would have done, as she might very well have been as lazy and stupid as her mother feared. Certainly I should have chosen the first envelope, and we both know you would have eschewed envelopes altogether and simply stolen the painting out from under the nose of the grief-stricken young lacebrain. I might have preferred it find the fire, for I have always hated Valrucheau's 'trois nymphes poursuivies par le cerf'. It is utterly fatuous in subject, the background is an inferior copy of Larelle's 'berger dans la vallée', and his use of light is almost certainly the result of a late revision by his student Dechambreux who toiled in obscurity all his days while his vaunted master availed himself of the adulation of a credulous and undiscerning public.
If you will insist on continuing this correspondence, I must demand you provide if not actual conversation--which I had heard tell was one of your great skills though my own encounters have been less than fully convincing on that point--at least witty tales of your daring exploits that I might marvel at your boldness and then pass along the details to the relevant authorities to see that no precious works of art are destroyed by your cavalier adventuring.
You may continue to reach me via the Inquisition, the Gallows, Kirkwall, for the foreseeable future.
Fatiguedly,
Baroness Haut-Brion