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From Letters of a Portuguese Nun written in 1669 by Guilleragues to the letter addressed to a libertine known as Defense of the Christian Religion (published in 1670 in Pensées by Pascal), an impetus carries away the anxiety, suffering, and loss that persist in the work of the letter. The anxiety of Pascal, lost in the face of the void, folding and sowing his papers addressed to God; the suffering of Marianne, the forsaken heroine, overwhelmed by the loss of her lover and endlessly writing her farewell letter, pent up in her convent . . . Both instances tend to prove that the letter is a metonymic agency which, regardless of the recipient or the postman, displaces them so that one must simply follow its route . . .