This is one of the happy days of my sad existence, because I can come to pass half an hour with you, talking to you and telling you of my life. You know that I am permitted to write to you but twice a week. I have received your two letters, of Friday and Saturday. Each time that they bring me a letter from you a ray of joy pierces to my wounded heart. What you told me in your letter of Saturday is perfectly true. Like you, I have the absolute conviction that all will be discovered, but when? You know that in the end everything is blunted, even the most heroic courage. And, then, between the courage that makes a man confront danger--no matter what danger it may be--and the courage that enables him to bear, without fainting, the worst of outrages, scorn and shame, there is a great difference. I have never lowered my head, believe it; my conscience forbade that. I have a right to look all the world in the face. But, alas! all the world cannot look into my soul, into my conscience. The fact is there, brutal and terrible. That is why each time that I receive one of your dear letters I have a ray of hope; I hope at last to hear some good news. If the Léons have come back to Paris, their impatience not letting them wait, only think how it is with me. I know that you all suffer as I do, that you partake of my anguish and my tortures, but you have your activity to distract you, a little, from this awful sorrow; while I am here, impatient, shut up alone night and day with my thoughts. I ask myself even now how my brain has been strong enough to resist so many and so oft-repeated blows; how is it that I have not gone mad. It is certain, my darling, that it is only your profound love which can make me still hold on to life. To have consecrated all my strength, all my intelligence, to the service of my country, and then suddenly to be accused of the greatest, the most monstrous, crime a soldier can commit--condemned for it--that is enough to disgust one with life! When my honor is given back to me--oh, may that day come soon!--then I will consecrate myself entirely to you and to our dear children. And then think of the terrible way I have still to traverse before I shall arrive at the end of my journey--crossing the seas for sixty or eighty days under conditions so appalling. I do not speak--you know it--of the material conditions of the passage; you know that my body has never worried me much; but the moral conditions! To be during all that time before sailors, the officers of the navy--that is, before honest and loyal soldiers--who will see in me a traitor, the most abject of criminals! At the bare thought of it my heart shrinks. I think that no innocent man in this world has ever endured the mental torments that I have already borne, that I have still to bear. So you can think that in each of your letters I search for that word of hope, so long waited for, so ardently desired.