"Brother, do not grow weary of my letter, nor of my company; think that soon you will be for ever released from my importunities. My life is casting its last light, like a lamp which has burnt out in the darkness of a long night, and which sees the rise of the dawn in which it is to die. Please, brother, cast a single glance at the early moments of our existence; remember that we have often been seated on the same lap, and pressed both together to the same bosom; that already you added tears to mine, that from the earliest days of your life you protected and defended my frail existence, that our games united us and that I shared your first studies. I will not speak to you of our adolescence, of the innocence of our thoughts and of our joys, nor of our mutual need to see each other incessantly. If I retrace the past, I candidly confess, brother, that it is to make me revive the more in your heart. When you left France for the second time, you placed your wife in my hands, you made me promise never to part from her. True to this dear engagement, I voluntarily stretched out my hands to the irons, and entered into the regions destined alone for the victims vowed to death. In those abodes I have had no anxiety save as to your fate; incessantly I questioned the forebodings of my heart touching yourself. When I had recovered my liberty, amidst the ills which came to overwhelm me, the thought alone of our meeting kept me up. To-day, when I am irretrievably losing the hope of running my course by your side, bear with my griefs. I shall become resigned to my destiny, and it is only because I am still fighting against it that I suffer such cruel anguish; but when I shall have grown submissive to my fate.... And what a fate! Where are my friends, my protectors and my treasures! To whom matters my existence, that existence abandoned by all, and weighing down entirely upon itself? My God, are not my present woes enough for my weakness, without yet adding to them the dread of the future? Forgive me, my too dear friend, I will resign myself; I will fall asleep, in a slumber as of death, upon my destiny. But, during the few days which I have to spend in this town, let me seek my last consolations in you; let me believe that my presence is sweet to you. Believe me, among the hearts that love you, none approaches the sincerity and tenderness of my impotent friendship for you. Fill my memory with agreeable recollections, which prolong my existence beside you. Yesterday, when you spoke to me of coming to you, you seemed to me anxious and serious, while your words were affectionate. Why, brother, could I be to you also a subject of aversion and annoyance? You know it was not I that proposed the amiable distraction of going to see you,