* * * * * _5 o’clock in the morning._ Before I send this letter I must come once more to embrace you with all my soul, with all my strength; to repeat to you that your conscience, your duty, our children, ought to be for you irresistible levers too strong for any human grief to bend. * * * * * _September, 1896._ Dear and good Lucie: I wrote to you upon the receipt of the July mail. The nervous strain has been too strong, too violent. I have an irresistible longing to come to talk to you, after this long, agonized silence of a whole month. Yes, sometimes my pen falls from my hands, and I ask myself what I gain by writing so much. I am dazed by all my suffering, my poor and dear Lucie. Yes, often, also, I ask myself what I have done that you, whom I love so much, that my poor children, that all of us, should be called to suffer thus; and, truly, I have moments of ferocious despair, of anger also, for I am not a saint. But then I call up, as I have always called up, the thought of you, of the poor little ones, and I evoke that feeling with which I have wished to inspire you, to inspire you all, since the beginning of this sad tragedy--that is, that there is above all our anguish something higher, more exalted. My letter is like a howl of pain, for we are like sorely wounded men whose minds are so worn out with pain, whose bodies are so maddened by long suffering, that the least thing causes their cups, full, too full, of sorrow, to overflow. But, dear Lucie, to speak forever of our grief is not a remedy for it, it only exasperates it. We must look at things as they are, and we all are horribly unhappy. Truly the end dominates everything--sufferings, life. I have told you this often and often, for it concerns the honor of our name, the life of our children. This object must be pursued without weakness until it is attained. But the human spirit is formed in such a way that it lives in the impressions of each day, and each day is composed of too many appalling minutes; we have been waiting for so long a time for a happier to-morrow. It is not with anger, it is not with lamentations, that you must hasten the moment when the truth shall be revealed. Concentrate your courage--and it ought to be great--strong in your conscience, strong in the duty you have to fulfill; look only to your object; look only into your heart of a wife, of a mother, the heart that for so many months has been so horribly crushed and ground.