_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.
Picture a little room all bare--four yards and a half long,
perhaps--closed by a grated garret window; a pallet standing against the
wall--no, I will not tear your heart, my poor darling.
I will tell you later, when we are happy again, what I have suffered
to-day, in all my wanderings, surrounded by men who are truly guilty,
how my heart has bled. I have asked myself why I was there; what I was
doing there. I seemed the victim of an hallucination; but alas! my
garments, torn, sullied, brought me back roughly to the truth. The looks
of scorn they cast on me told me too well why I was there. Oh, why could
not my heart have been opened by a surgeon’s knife, so that they might
have read the truth! All the brave, good people along my way could have
read it: “_This is a man of honor!_” But how easy it is to understand
them! In their place I could not have contained my contempt for an
officer who I had been told was a traitor. But alas! there is the
tragedy. There is a traitor, but it is not I!
Write to me soon; do everything in your power so that I may see you, for
my strength is giving way. I need to be upheld; come, so that we may be
together once again, that I may find in your heart all the strength I
need in this awful hour.