“Your letter is as good and true as your heart; but I send you back this page of it, which is absurd and quite out of place. No one must write in such terms to me. If you criticise my costume, let it be on other grounds. It is really better you should not interfere at all. Read the parts I have underlined, they are astoundingly impertinent. I don’t think you were quite responsible when you wrote them. I am not angry and am not less attached to you, but I must beg you not to be so foolish again. It does not suit you.... “My friends will respect me just as much, I hope, in a coat as in a dress. I do not go out in male habiliments without a stick, so do not be afraid ... and be assured I do not aspire to the dignity of a man. It seems to me too ridiculous a position to be preferable to the servitude of a woman. I only wish to possess to-day, and for ever, that delightful and complete independence which you seem to imagine is your prerogative alone. You can tell your friends and acquaintances that it is absolutely useless to attempt to presume on my attire or my black eyes, for I do not allow any impertinence, however I may be dressed.” She became Republican, almost Communistic in her views, founded a paper, the _Cause du Peuple_, and contributed to another, the _Commune de Paris_. “It seems to me,” she writes to her son, “that the earth belongs to God, who made it and has given it to man as a haven of refuge. It cannot therefore be His intention that some should suffer from repletion, while others die of hunger. All that any one can say on the subject will not prevent me from feeling miserable and angry when I see a beggar man moaning at a rich man’s door. “If I say all this to you, however, you must not repeat it or show my letter. You know your father’s opinions are different. You must listen to him with respect, but your conscience is free, and you can choose between his ideas and mine. I will teach you many things if you and I ever live together. If we are not fated to enjoy this happiness (the greatest I can imagine, and the only thing that would make me wish to stop on earth), you will pray God for me, and from the bosom of death, if anything remains of me in the Universe, my spirit will watch over you.”