"Yes, you must be suffering, Pierre, to speak to me in that way--me, your old companion, your friend! your brother--I a Judas? I a traitor?--Look me in the face. You have insulted me, threatened me--almost struck me--and you see I have no feeling in my heart for you except the friendship that is as tender, as sentient as it was yesterday, as it was a year, ten years, twenty years ago! I have played with you?--I have deceived you?--No, you cannot think that, you do not believe it!--You know well enough that our friendship is not dead, that it cannot die!--And all"--here his voice became agitated and bitter--"because of a woman!--A woman has come between us, and you have forgotten all, you have renounced all.--Ah! Pierre, arouse yourself, I implore you; tell me that you only spoke in your anger; tell me that you still care for me, that you still believe in our friendship. I ask it in the name of our childhood, of those innocent moments when we met and mourned because we were not really brothers. Is there a single recollection of that time with which I am not connected?--To efface you from my life would be to destroy all my past, all that part of it that I turn to with pride, that I contemplate when I want to free myself from the vileness of the present!--For God's sake, remember our youth and all that it held of good and noble and pure affection. In 1870, the day after Sedan, when you wanted to enlist, you came to seek me, do you recollect? And you found me going off to your house. Do you remember the embrace that drew us heart to heart? Ah! if any one had told us that a day would arrive when you would call me traitor, that you would call me, by whose side you wanted to die, a Judas; with what confidence we should have replied, 'Impossible!' And do you remember the snowy night in the forest of Chagey, toward the end, when we learned that all was lost, that the army was entering Switzerland and that on the morrow we had to give up our arms? And have you forgotten our oath, that if ever we had to fight again, we would be together, shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart, in the same line?--Suppose the hour should come, what would you do without me?--Ah, you are looking at me again, you understand me, you feel with me.--Come to my arms, Pierre, as on that third of September, now more than ten years ago, and yet it seems like yesterday.--Everything else in this life may fail us, but not our friendship.--Everything else is passion, sensual, delirium, but that feeling is our heart, that friendship is our very being!"