In this letter to her sister in 1790, Hannah More deplored the disorder in France after the fall of the Bastille. The More sisters were pioneers in the movement to educate the poor: yet here a servant's reading provides a readily decipherable symbol of anarchy, still sharper because the servant is a woman. More's anecdote extends its theme of the class specificity of good reading from the rebellious servant to possible readers of the letter. Although I have translated the maidservant's words, More gives them in French. Her, and her sister's, knowledge of that language demonstrates genteel education and status, and no lowerclass person who saw the letter could emulate the maid's transgressive reading act because the account of it is coded in a form only accessible to the genteel reader.