Oh, noble friend, what has not the howling and monstrous beast of hatred said of you?
No doubt you, like myself, were unable to struggle against fraudulent financiers, deceitful men of law and treacherous friends. But to dare to insinuate that you have ever subjugated my will, misled my steps, falsified my acts—ah! it is more absurd than infamous.
I have, I always have had, a power of resistance capable of sacrificing everything to an ideal of honour and liberty, otherwise I should have been a mere doll, or a weathercock responsive to every breath.
Full of consciousness as regards the essentials of human dignity, I should then be unconsciousness personified for things of secondary importance.
Is not that foolish?
But let us leave this topic and throw a new light on the subject of the incredible attempts of a hatred which nothing could disarm up to that day when another justice, not that of man, overthrew thrones so unworthily occupied and delivered me from the persecutions of which I was the object.
On the eve of their fall the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchs still believed they could do as they liked with me. The wrongs I suffered are only one example of what they dared do. What crimes have they not committed which still lie hidden! And what corruption clings even to their memory!
The commencement of the intrigues which brought about my fall is known to the world.
I was at Nice with my daughter. Dora, who represented alike my hope and my consolation, was taken from me by her fiancé, who was in league with the Prince of Coburg, and who broke the solemn promise he had given me.
The prince instinctively felt that I intended to make my escape, and he knew that with me would also vanish his hopes of possessing my inheritance from the King of the Belgians.