Page:Lettres d'un innocent; the letters of Captain Dreyfus to his wife ; (IA lettresduninnoce00drey).pdf/130

 five months; in such a length of time the truth might well make great strides.

Like you, like you all, I am, I have been always, convinced that in time all will be discovered.

If I have wavered at times, it has been under the burden of atrocious moral suffering while anxiously waiting to know, at last, the solution of the riddle which absolutely baffles me.

You must understand through the feeling of reserve that keeps me from speaking to you on any aspect of my life here. Moreover, the only thoughts that agitate me are those that I tell to you; for the rest I live like a machine, unconscious of its movement.

It happens to me at times—and you, too, must feel this—when I am wide awake, and in spite of all that surrounds me, I stand bewildered, repeating to myself: "No, all that did not happen; it cannot be possible; it is a fiction; it is not reality!" I cannot explain to myself this passing inertia of the brain in any way other than by the impassable distance that lies between the innocence in my conscience and my present life. Nor can you picture to yourself what relief this long conversation with you brings to me. I dare not even read over my letter, so afraid am I to find in it repeatedly the same ideas expressed perhaps in exactly the same way; but for you, as for me, true pleasure consists in reading what the other has written.

When my heart is overburdened, when I am seized by the deep horror of it all, I draw new energy from your eyes, from the faces of our dear children. Your portrait, the portraits of the children here on my table, are always before my eyes. And then, you see, when a man has lost his fortune, when he has been subjected to some