last thing was, about four weeks ago, a complaint with the public prosecutor against me for incest, the punishment for which is, as we all know, five years in prison. You see that the very most extreme means are being used to "destroy" me! To endure this, without losing the faith in God, the belief in the good of mankind, and all joy of life and strength to live, is an act I hardly think everybody would be capable of. I have endured it, without allowing myself to be tempted to take the law into my own hands, because I am incapable of doubting for a single moment in God and his love, and because, in all of these more than hard times, there had been a person by my side, whose brave, upward striving soul had lifted me up, like on the wings of angels, above all suffering, I was meant to be subjected to, this person is my present wife. If someone has had the right to write books on the topic of "The Savage Beast in a Woman" [b], I might just as well feel obliged to publish, as a contrast to this, a book bearing the title "Heaven in a Woman". [a] This should probably read "grandfather-in-law", referring to C.G. Pollmer, the grandfather of Karl May's first wife. At any rate, Lebius's accusation is bogus. [b] "Die Bestie im Weibe" by Carl Felix von Schlichtegroll (1862-1946). With such a woman by my side, who is a source everything which is clean, noble, and eternal in a human being, everything can be achieved in respect to the pains of life on earth, and everything can be performed in respect to the work which is still ahead for me, as far as it is humanly possible. I am no longer so terribly alone. No longer, I have to tap into nothing but my own inner self, but rather I have been joined by a delightfully plentiful living soul, by whose influence everything inside of me which is leading me towards the good goal is being doubled. Severely ailing physically, I am of a fresh mind and in my soul at least just as much full of confidence as in my youth. I am not foolish enough to deny to myself that I am regarded as an outcast, cast out from the church, society, and literature. One person will start bashing at me, because he regards me as a Catholic or even Jesuit in disguise; another one will reach for the cudgel, because he thinks that I was still secretly a Protestant. Do you think that those two would manage to pledge their allegiance exclusively to whomever they happen to get the most thorough thrashing from at any given time? That I am regarded as socially dead, I do not care about. I do not have the slightest reason to be eager to be a part of that society the acquaintance of which I had been forced to make in my times of suffering. By the way, we two old folks, my dear wife and I, are thus perfectly sufficient to one another in respect to world within ourselves, that we would not even be capable to yearn for the "society" of others. And concerning me being cast out from literature, I can also live with that.