Kiss the babies for me. A thousand kisses.
Alfred.
The parlor is to be occupied to-morrow, Thursday, from 1 until 4 o’clock. So you must come either in the morning between 10 and 11 o’clock, or in the afternoon at 4 o’clock. This takes place only Thursdays and Sundays.
IN THE PRISON OF LA SANTE.
5 January, 1895.
I will not tell you what I have suffered to-day. Your grief is great enough already. I will not augment it.
In promising you to live, in promising you to resist until my name is rehabilitated, I have made the greatest sacrifice that a man of deep feeling of heart, an upright man, from whom his honor has been taken, can make. My God, let not my physical strength abandon me! My spirit is unshaken; a conscience that has nothing with which to reproach me upholds me, but I am coming to the end of patience and of my physical strength. After having consecrated all my life to honor, never having deserved reproach, to be here, to have borne the most wounding affront that can be inflicted upon a soldier!
Oh, my darling, do everything in the world to find the guilty one; do not relax your efforts for one instant. That is my only hope in the terrible misfortune which pursues me.
If only I may soon be with you there, and if we may soon be united, you will give me back my strength and my courage. I have need of both. This day’s emotions have broken my heart; my cell offers me no consolation.