Before sending you the letter that I had written, I re-read, perhaps for the hundredth time, your dear letters, for you can imagine what my long days and nights are like, when, my arms crossed, I am alone with my thoughts, without anything to read, sustaining myself only by the force of duty, so that I may uphold you so that I may see, at last, the day when our honor is given back to us. You ask me to await calmly the day when you can announce to me the discovery of the truth. Ask me to wait as long as I have the strength; but with calmness? Oh, no! When they have torn, all-living, the heart from my breast, when I feel myself struck in my most precious possession, in you and my children, when my heart groans with agony night and day, without one hour of rest, when for eighteen months I have lived in a frightful nightmare! But, then, that which I desire with a ferocious determination, that which has made me bear everything, that which has made me live, is not that you should protest my innocence by your words, but that you should march, that you all should march, straight forward, no matter by what means, to the conquest of the truth, to the laying bare in the full light of day this dark story ... in a word, to the recovery of our whole honor. These are the words I spoke to you before my departure--already more than a year ago ... and, alas! it is not that I would reproach you; but it seems to me that you are very long on this supreme mission, for it is not living to live without honor.