Alfred.
Embrace your dear parents, all our family and friends for me. In the mail which I have just received I have not found letters from any of my sisters except Henriette. I hope that these dear sisters are not sick from these terrible and continued trials.
22 May, 1896.
My dear Lucie:
Your good and most affectionate letters of March have been the dear and sweet companions of my solitude. I have read them and re-read them to recall to me my duty each time that the situation was crushing me with its weight. I have suffered with you, with you all; all the frightful anguish through which you have passed has echoed in my own.
You ask me to write to you, to come and tell you all that is in my crushed and bleeding heart whenever my bitterness is too great for me to bear. Ah, my poor Lucie! If I should do as you bid, I should be writing very often, for I have not one moment of respite. But why should I thus tear your heart? I already do this too often, and after I have thus poured out my woes I always regret it bitterly, for you have already suffered enough, far too much for me. But what would you? It is impossible to break away absolutely from one’s ego, to stifle always the revolts of one’s heart, to be always master of one’s sick nerves. My only moment when the tension is relaxed is when I write to you, and then all the accumulated grief of the long month at times goes out into what I write.... And then I feel so profoundly in the very depths of my being all the horror of our situation, as well for you and me as for your dear parents, for all our family, that bursts of anger, quivers of indignation, escape in spite of my efforts; then I cry out in my impatience to see the end of this abominable suffering for us all. I suffer because I am powerless to lighten your atrocious sorrow, because I can only sustain you with all the power of my love, with all the ardor of my soul. Ah, truly yes, dear Lucie, I feel all your anguish when each mail day arrives, and after a long month of waiting, of suffering, and of agony, you cannot yet announce to me the discovery of the guilty wretches, the end of our tortures! And if then I cry out, if at times I roar aloud, if the blood boils in my veins with all this agony, so long drawn out, so undeserved, oh, it is as much for you as for me! For if I had had only myself to think of in my sufferings, long ago I should have put an end to it all, leaving it to the future to be the final judge of everything.
It is from the thought of you, the thought of our dear children, from my determined resolve to sustain you, to live to see the day when our honor shall be given back to us, that I draw all my strength. When I sink under the united burden of all my woes, when my brain reels, when my heart can bear no more, when I lose all hope, then to myself I murmur three names—yours, those of our dear children—and I nerve myself again against my agony, and not a sound passes my silent lips. To tell the truth, I am physically very weak; it could not be otherwise. But everything is effaced from my mind, hallucinating memories, sufferings, the atrocities of my daily life, before so exalted, so absolute a preoccupation, the thought of our honor, the patrimony of our children. So I come again, as always, to cry to you with all my strength, with all my soul, “Courage, and still courage, to march steadfastly onward to your goal—the unclouded honor of our name”—and to wish for both our sakes that this goal may soon be reached. The dear little letters written by the children always move me deeply, cause me extreme emotion; I often wet them with my tears, but I draw from them also my strength. In all my letters I read that you are raising these dear little children admirably. If I have never spoken of this to you it has been because I knew it, because I knew you.
To speak of my love for you, the love that unites us all, would be useless, would it not? Still, let me tell you again that my thought never leaves you for an instant day or night, that my heart is always near to you, to our children, to you all, ready to sustain you, to animate you with my unconquerable will.
I embrace you with all my strength, with all my heart, and also the dear children, while I wait to receive your good letters, the only rays of sunshine that come to warm my cruelly wounded heart.