Since the very first Sunday, we have been writing to you by email. It is practical, it is immediate, it lets us reach you wherever you are, and we will go on doing exactly that every week, as we always have. Let this be clear from the first line: nothing you are reading today is going to change. This letter, the one you are holding on your screen, will remain free and weekly for as long as we write.

But there is something a screen will never be able to do, and that is what we want to tell you about this evening.

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When we began digging into the history of the manor, we found letters. Real ones. Yellowed paper, faded ink, a slanting hand we had to learn to decipher. Words written more than a century ago by people who had no idea we would one day read them. And we were struck by something simple: those letters had crossed the years because they were objects. Someone had kept them, put them away, passed them on. An email does not sit in a tin box in an attic. It is not found, a hundred years later, by strangers restoring a house.

So we had an idea. A slightly mad idea, slightly against the current, but one that suits us.

We decided to offer, to those who would like it, a version of these letters that truly exists. Not an email. An object. But not only the letters.

Each month, you receive an envelope at home gathering the Sunday letters of the month just past, printed on beautiful paper and embossed in relief as it was once done. But the envelope holds more than that. With every posting we slip in a photograph of the manor, printed to be kept, and a collector's vignette, one a month, telling the story of the rebuilding as it goes. And each time, a surprise, which we will not reveal here, because then it would no longer be a surprise.

It is a piece of post you find in your letterbox among the bills and the leaflets, and which is neither a bill nor a leaflet. Post you open slowly. That you read, that you look at, that you put away. That you can keep, reread in a year, perhaps pass on.

We have called it The Egmont Letters Club. And we would like to tell you honestly what it is, and what it costs.

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One word before the rest, because we would rather say it ourselves than have you discover it. The letters themselves are printed in English, exactly as you read them here. But the vignettes and the small surprises are made in France, with French artisans and French printers, and they are in French. We could have had a separate English version produced. We preferred to send you the very same object our French readers receive, made by the same hands, rather than a translated approximation. We hope you will take it as we mean it: not as a compromise, but as a small piece of this house exactly as it is.

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It costs €16.90 a month, (€9,90 for France, Andorra and Monaco). Everything included: postage, paper, printing, embossing, envelope, the photograph, the vignette, the surprise. We want to be transparent with you, because trust is the only thing we have really built with you so far. Most of that €16.90 covers real costs, the post and its stamps, the paper, the relief printing, which cost what they cost when you refuse to do things by halves. International postage from France is considerably more expensive than domestic, which is why this subscription costs more than the one our French readers pay. We would rather explain that plainly than hide it. This is not a product designed to make a margin. It is an object designed to be beautiful, and to play a modest part in the manor's return to life.

And because a subscription like this one is a way of walking alongside us over time, it also opens the Archives to you: every letter published so far, gathered together, available whenever you want them on our site.

There it is. No commitment, cancel at any time, at no cost, in two clicks. We did not build this to keep hold of you, but to offer you something we would have liked to receive ourselves.

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We want to be very clear on one point, because it matters to us. Subscribing is in no way necessary to go on reading us. The Sunday letter by email will stay exactly where it is, whole, free, faithful. We have no intention of turning what we share freely into something you would have to pay for. The paper version is not a better version. It is a different one, for those whom the idea of real post on a Sunday makes smile, or for those who simply want to support the rebuilding of the manor in a slightly more committed way.

If that is you, the link is below, and we will be honoured to write to you, truly, in ink pressed into paper.

And if it is not, change nothing. Stay exactly where you are. We will meet again next Sunday, as always, on this screen.

With all our gratitude, whatever you decide.

Until next Sunday,
Dimitri & David

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