My aide-de-camp delivered to me yesterday the letter which your Royal Highness has done me the honour to address to me.
By your return of the letter which you received from me, I imagine your Royal Highness imputes to me exasperated feelings. Your Highness does not render me justice: I have been a soldier twenty-two years; I am habituated to good and to evil fortune.
Your Highness does me the honour to say, that it was quite to be expected that the Emperor Alexander should have the power of ratifying, or not ratifying, the capitulation. Either your Highness was furnished with full powers or you were not; under the last supposition my conduct would have been very different from what it has been.
Marshal Kalkreuth, after a very short defence, obtained a very honourable capitulation. I even recollect that the Emperor Napoleon, who was not twenty leagues from the fortress, was dissatisfied with it, but he would not put his commander-in-chief in an unpleasant position by annulling the capitulation. It was impossible to perform it with more fidelity and delicacy than it was executed with, by Marshal Lefebvre and myself. Marshal Kalkreuth is still living, and has preserved the remembrance of our proceedings. There are Prussian officers at your head-quarters who can also bear witness to them.
Your Highness does me the honour to say that his Majesty orders that all things shall be put upon their previous footing, if I wish to recommence hostilities. Your Highness knows perfectly well that the advantages were at the time of entering on the capitulation on our side, for you had constantly made us offers which you pretended to be favourable; you know that now it is quite the contrary: this assertion stands in no need of proofs.
Besides, my Lord, it is you who have always proposed to me to enter into an arrangement to stop the effusion of blood; offering, as the fundamental condition, our return to France. The correspondence of your Highness attests this fact.
Your Highness knows well in what situation we are placed, and that it is altogether impossible, in all respects, to prolong our defence. The choice which you leave me becomes perfectly illusory.
I pray your Highness to cause to be occupied to-day Weichselmunde, the Holm, and the intermediate works. I have only left in them small detachments to prevent waste. I desire also that your Highness will send commissaries to receive inventories of our magazines of all kinds. I attach importance to this, that there may be no complaints, and that we may not be reproached with having deteriorated any thing; not in the fear of going to Russia with fewer conveniences, which your Highness insists on in your letter, but through the desire of religiously fulfilling all my engagements.
I have the honour again to declare to your Highness, that the garrison of Dantzic will leave the fortress on the 1st of January, in the morning, in execution of Art. I. of the capitulation of November 29; to which I entirely adhere, and to which it is quite useless to add any other arrangement. Circumstances will, after the evacuation, place us entirely at the disposal of your Highness.
I have the honour, &c.