And I'm not talking about The Picture of Dorian Gray. Jane Shilling laments the decline of love letters in an age of texting:

Ted Howard is an 82-year-old retired farm worker and machinery demonstrator from Cambridgeshire. One day in the summer of 1948 he was at a village fair when a girl jumped off a carousel and ran into him. Her name was Mollie and he knew her by sight. She was a farmer's daughter and he used to wave to her from his tractor when he drove past the field in which she was cleaning mangelwurzels.

After she ran into him at the fair they started courting, and for the next seven years, as his work took him travelling through England, Ireland, France and Holland, he wrote her almost 100 love letters. One day, in a fit of pique, she tore them into tiny pieces and stuffed the shreds into a cushion from which, 40 years later, Ted retrieved them. He spent 15 years, on and off, sorting the fragments, sticking them back together and photocopying the restored originals. Now he plans to write a book based on the letters, to be called A Week at Stanton, as a tribute to Mollie - who became his wife, and died three years ago after 50 years of marriage.

[...]

[T]his is the second time in a couple of months that I have read of letters being shredded and stuffed into a cushion. In his memoir, Nothing to be Frightened of, Julian Barnes describes an object brought home by his father from India. It was “a circular leather pouffe...I used to drop my full adolescent weight down on to it, with a kind of aggressive affection...eventually, the seams began to give way...and I made the sort of discovery psychoanalysts might relish.” The pouffe, it turned out, was stuffed with the torn-up letters of his parents' courtship and early married years. “How could they have taken their love letters...torn them into tiny pieces, and then watched other people's fat arses hunker down on top?” Barnes wonders. Then a further thought strikes him: “Here's a haunting would-you-rather. Would you rather tear up your own expressions of love, or the ones you had received?”

So this is what they mean by a billet-doux? I'm not sure I buy this story. It's pretty obvious Barnes' parents wanted the letters to be discovered, or why stuff them in a pouffe, where the rustling would be a dead giveaway? I haven't sat on a pouffe since I was a child, never being able to see the point of them, but it would take a lot of love letters to stuff one, and they'd surely be squashed flat in no time. I don't know if there's a novel in my sofa, but it may have a story to tell.

Common language division update: Regular reader Paul has alerted me to the double entendre potential of a number of words in this post. I was shocked, shocked to read his muckamucky interpretations. Honi soit qui mal y pense, as always.