How will she live through you is the question which at the present time troubles all those who have retained their faith in the restoration of France. You have not to see the Prussian cavalry galloping victoriously among the poplars of your native land to sustain you. And of the horrible civil war, you have only the picturesque ruins of the Cour des Comptes, or the trees putting forth luxuriant vegetation among the scorched stones which lend poetic attraction to the old palaces. We have never been able to conclude that the peace of ’71 has settled everything for all time. How I should like to know if you think as we do! How I should like to be sure that you are not ready to renounce the secret dream, the consolatory hope which each one of us had, even of those of us who never spoke of it! But I am sure that you feel sad whenever you pass the Arc de Triomphe where others have passed, even on those beautiful summer evenings in company with the one you love. You would leave her cheerfully to-morrow to go to the front if it should be necessary, I am sure of it. But it is not enough to know how to die. Have you resolved to know how to live? When you look at this Arc de Triomphe and recall the epoch of the Grande Armée, do you regret that you did not feel the heroic breath of the conscripts of that time? When you recall 1830, and the glorious struggles of Romanticism, do you experience nostalgia at not having, like those of Hernani, a great literary standard to defend? Do you feel, when you meet one of the masters of to-day--a Dumas, a Taine, a Leconte de Lisle--that you are in the presence of one of the depositaries of the genius of your race? When you read such books as must be written when it is necessary to depict the criminal passions and their martyrdom, do you wish to love more wisely than the authors of these books have loved? Have you, my brother, more of the Ideal than we have--have you more faith than we have--more hope than we? If you have, give me your hand and let me thank you.