Page:Lettres d'un innocent; the letters of Captain Dreyfus to his wife ; (IA lettresduninnoce00drey).pdf/208

 well as you, that I repeat myself always since the very first day of this sad tragedy; for my thought is like your own, like the thought of you all, like the will that must sustain and inspire us.

And when I come in this way to chat with you for a few moments—oh, such fleeting instants!—in regard to that thought which never leaves me night or day, it seems to me that I live for one short moment with you, that I feel that your heart is groaning with mine, and then I long to press you in my arms, to take your two hands in mine, and to say to you again, "Yes, all this is atrocious; but never should a moment of discouragement enter into your soul any more than it ever enters into mine. Just as I am a Frenchman and a father, so must you be a Frenchwoman and a mother. The name that our dear children bear must be washed free of this horrible stain; there must not remain one single Frenchman who has one doubt of our honor." That is our object, always the same. But, alas! if one can be a stoic in the presence of death, it is difficult to be one before this anguish of every day, confronted by this harrowing thought, the question, when is this horrible nightmare to end, in which we have lived so long—if it can be called living to suffer without respite.

I have lived so long in the deluding expectation of a better day to come, wrestling, not against the weaknesses of the flesh—they leave me indifferent; it may be because I am haunted by other preoccupations—but against the weaknesses of the brain, against the weaknesses of the heart. And then in these moments of horrible distress, of almost insupportable pain, so much greater because it is compressed, contained—I can give absolutely no vent to it—I long to cry to you across the