"Dearest mother, I will write to you again soon: my head is still too much in a whirl; I have touched on too many topics; my woman's brains are not capable of thinking that all out logically and coherently and writing it down.... And I have only been empress for such a short time and I am only twenty-two, though I no longer feel so young.... This letter is but a hurriedly-written reply to your doleful self-reproach, which I now beseech you in Heaven's name to put aside _entirely_. Now that I write this to you, the evening of my betrothal-dinner at Sigismundingen rises before my mind. We were such a strange engaged couple, Othomar and I! I asked him--smile at this, mamma, and don't cry about it--whether he loved anybody. He said no. He told me he loved his people and he stretched out his arms, as though he would have embraced them. His people! The dawn of a new idea--old no doubt to thousands and ages old, but new to me, as a new day is new--shone out before me, threw light over my gloomy sufferings, brightened a road before me.... "That road, mamma, I now see stretching before me clearer and clearer every day; and I mean to follow it with my husband and my child, with my emperor and my crown-prince ... my crown-prince, who is waking and crying for me! "May God grant me strength, mamma! "VALÉRIE."