She wants a divorce but the count is threatening to divulge the contents of an apparently compromising letter.
In Edgar Allan Poe's short story, a French minister steals a compromising letter from the royal palace and hides it in plain sight above the fireplace, while the police tear up floorboards, furniture and garden to no avail.
The plot turns on the attempts made by almost all the cast to break into the safe of the Chateau Blissac to steal a) a compromising letter and b) some extravagant diamonds belonging to Mrs Gedge, while at the same time finding true love.
He is upset by the subject of murder because of his own responsibility for a man's death while handling another unsavory assignment: the retrieval of a purse from a prostitute for Sir Owen Nettleton, a baronet with a weakness for night life who wants his purse back for a packet of compromising letters it contains.
And Paulette Haslo is a defrocked minister, who was caught trying to steal back some compromising letters she wrote to a married man.
In France, for instance, Joseph Caillaux, a politician in favor of pursuing détente with Germany, would likely have been Prime Minister in 1914, had his wife not murdered a newspaper editor, who was orchestrating a campaign against her husband, and who she feared would publish letters compromising to her reputation.
It's "Dallas" in military drag, in which a ridiculously retro social order (who knew that "socialites" and "hostesses" even existed anymore, never mind in Tampa) slams into the high-tech world of cyberstalking — only to reveal a story as old as the written word: The Case of the Compromising Love Letter.
But speaking at a press conference in Zintan on Monday, the local brigade commander, Alajmi al-Atiri, repeated accusations that Taylor had smuggled secret letters to Saif, compromising Libya's national security.
Most depressing of all was her late romantic fixation on the Italian adventurer Ferdinando Gatteschi, to whom she gave sums of money she could ill afford, and from whom she was eventually obliged to extract compromising personal letters of her own under a threat of blackmail.
The Bell, more timely, consisted of political statements, compromising materials on government officials, and letters from all corners of the empire.
The findings suggest that there may be no or only a very small advantage to hand signing of covering letters, and future postal surveys could use covering letters with scanned and printed signatures without compromising the response rate.
