The light in his chamber was pale and fluctuating. By what miracle of love, of hatred, or of vengeance, did he recognise instantly the features that he had never forgotten? The event was so startling, so dreadful, that at first he believed himself to be the sport of a dream. He did not dare move. His body leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the medallion, he feared every moment to see what he took for a vision of his excited imagination vanish from his sight. Finally, falling on his knees, he threw himself upon the medallions, as if he feared they might escape his grasp. He seized the portraits. One of them represented a woman of resplendent beauty. He was not mistaken; he had recognised it. The other was the face of a child. The pirate let the medallion fall on the floor; he was petrified with amazement. He had just recognised Erebus! Erebus, at least, as he was fifteen years before, when he had carried him away from the coasts of Languedoc! Still doubting what he saw with his own eyes, he rallied from this passing weakness, picked up the medallion, recalled his memories with exactness, to provide against every error, and again examined the portrait with a consuming anxiety. It was Erebus, indeed,--Erebus at the age of five years. Then Pog threw himself on the floor with the letters, and read them on his knees without a thought of rising. The scene was something terrible,--ghastly. This man, pale, stained with blood, kneeling in the middle of that lugubrious chamber, read with eagerness the pages which revealed to him, at last, the dark mystery which he had sought for so many years. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE LETTERS We will now put before the eyes of the reader the letters that Pog was reading with such painful attention. The first had been written by himself, about twenty years before the period of which we now speak. So striking was the contrast between his life then,--a life calm, happy, and smiling,--and the life of a pirate and murderer, that one might be moved to pity the unhappy man, if only by comparing him as he was, to what he had been in the past. The height from which he had fallen, the depth of infamy to which he had descended, must have moved the most obdurate heart to pity! These letters will unveil also what mysterious tie united the Commander des Anbiez, Erebus, and Pog, to whom we restore his real name, that of Count Jacques de Montreuil, former lieutenant of the king’s galleys. M. de Montreuil--Pog--had written the following letter to his wife on his return from a campaign of eight or nine months in the Mediterranean. This letter was dated from the lazaretto, or pest-house, in Marseilles. The galley of Count de Montreuil, having touched at Tripoli, of Syria, where the plague had been declared, was compelled according to custom to submit to a long quarantine. Madame Emilie de Montreuil lived in a country house situated on the borders of the Rhone, near Lyons. _First Letter_.