Nevertheless, these four and a half millions were only a drop in the ocean compared with the promise of the past. My dear country can therefore rejoice, and I rejoice with her, that, by the victory of the Entente, she has escaped a revision of the lawsuit touching the Royal inheritance, one which would have been in direct opposition to the Divine and human right, at least as soon as the decree had been issued. What crime would not then have been committed in my name in favour of the final triumph of German arms if, threatened with the pangs of starvation, I had signed certain renunciations which were extorted from me at Munich, and had thereby lost my personality and abandoned my rights to my children in consideration of a miserable pittance? They now saw themselves likely to be compensated in some measure for all that had previously prevented them from acquiring the King's inheritance. They had also the certainty of possessing the thirty millions which represent my share of the fortune of Her Majesty the Empress Charlotte, when my unfortunate aunt succumbs beneath the burden of her advanced age. My children--from the hour when they became aware of the frightful state of destitution to which I was reduced during the war--have only pursued one end: _without troubling to see me or to approach me directly_, they have endeavoured by the mediation of paid agents to force me to sign a renunciation of my expectations. [Illustration: THE DUCHESS GUNTHER OF SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN] In direct defiance of the law I was ordered to sign my name to a document by which I relinquished my future inheritance from the Empress to my children. At last, worn out with sufferings, I was on the point of consenting for a consideration of an annual payment of a sum of _six thousand marks_, in exchange for which I was to be reduced to isolation and slavery, and to be further plundered of all that might belong to me. I will say nothing here to the Duke of Holstein, this soldier financier; but to my daughter Dora, the fruit of my body, whom I have fed at my breast, and whom I have brought up, I say this: "You may possess all the outward appearances of respectability. You may enjoy the benefits of a fortune of which I know the source, you may experience neither shame nor remorse, you may even dare to pray. But God can never be deceived. No wickedness, no guilty complicity, no action contrary to Nature will escape His justice. Sooner or later He will judge all men according to their works." Before I conclude my account of the machinations of these human vultures who attempted to assail my liberty and my rights, when once I had been unfortunate enough to ask help from my children, I must not forget to mention that later, when I regained the captaincy of my soul, I appealed to Justice at Munich. The courts there declared the renunciations extracted from me in my misery and frenzy when I was starving and homeless to be invalid.