"Is this a love history?" he asked himself, recalling Naundorff's beautiful countenance and indefinable charm. With feverish anxiety, he turned the leaf and read: "This is the recital of my misfortunes which you alone can assuage. Remember that you must at last stand before God." Then the text continued: Since my tireless enemies and malevolent fate are combined for the purpose of forcing me to die beneath a spurious name and destitute of the rights to which my birth entitles me; since you, yourself (in whom I had faith because it seemed monstrous to doubt you), have discredited my claim: I hold up to you a mirror reflecting the insistent memories of which you are so great a part, that your remorse may hereafter be the greater, if this appeal I make softens not your heart and if the impositions of royalty outweigh the supplications of blood. A day shall come, Thérèse, when posterity, marveling at my abandoned condition, will indignantly ask why the powers of Europe made no protest at the iniquity practised upon me. But that posterity should consider the fate of our parents,--yours and mine, Thérèse,--the fate of the ignominious journey to the guillotine as well as the indifference before that spectacle of those who should have burned their last cartridge in defence of the victims! Ah, Thérèse! In vain do you seek to restore THE PRINCIPLE,--to use the expression you of the Court employ--in vain do you seek to restore THE PRINCIPLE which is the basis of our national glory. Our country's weakness at the present time consists in the repudiation of that PRINCIPLE. Perhaps I seem a dreamer or a lunatic, but, nevertheless, 'tis by the light of my unparalleled misfortunes that I perceive the impending cataclysm. The PRINCIPLE has suicided and the INSTITUTION has received its death blow. What life remains to it will be puerile and despicable. Trampled by its enemies, humiliated, scourged, manacled, crowned in mockery, buffeted, its purple mantle in shreds, it shall at last be crucified, not to await a glorious resurrection but to crumble to dust in a fleur de lis cemetery. Fools are those who build above a raging torrent. Lay not the flattering unction to your soul, Thérèse, that you have saved the dynasty by sacrificing your brother. God is no Moloch to be propitiated by such holocausts. Sterile has been your womb as a warning to you, and other lessons, tremendous and desolating, have you yet to learn. As for me, my descendants will toil and sweat over labors as arduous as my own, and so shall the ages expiate.