People like us who have never harboured a thought for which we had reason to blush before the world, our parents, or God, people like ourselves can read one another’s heart like an open book. I have never been romantic, and I shall not be a melancholy hero. However, without words, protestations, or vows, I have laid my life in your hands. You fail me, and, I repeat once more, you are quite right in acting thus; nevertheless in losing you I lose part of my life. The moment you part from me, Valentine, I am alone in the world. My sister is happy with her husband; her husband is only my brother-in-law, that is to say, a man who is attached to me solely by social laws; no one on earth has any further need of my useless existence. This is what I shall do: I shall wait until you are actually married, for I will not lose the smallest of one of those unexpected chances fate sometimes holds in store for us. After all, Monsieur Franz might die, a thunderbolt might fall on the altar as you approach it; everything appears possible to the condemned man, to whom a miracle becomes an everyday occurrence when it is a question of saving his life. I shall therefore wait until the very last moment, and when my fate is sealed, and my misery beyond all hope and remedy, I shall write a confidential letter to my brother-in-law, another one to the prefect of police, to notify him of my design; then, in a corner of some wood, in a ditch, or on the bank of some river, I shall blow out my brains, as certainly as I am the son of the most honest man who ever breathed in France.