In the fourth act Nathalie keeps her promise, and the Elector sends her with a mysterious letter to the Prince in his prison.  He tells her laconically that the Prince is saved just as surely as pardon lies in his own wish.  She brings the letter to the prisoner and he reads:  “If you believe that I have been unjust, tell me, I beg you, in a word or two, and forthwith I will send you back your sword.”  Such words could be used only by the majesty which would be revered even without a crown, and the Prince feels it at once.  “I cannot tell him that!” he cries out when Nathalie presses him to write as the letter bids him.  “What matter?” he answers curtly, when she assures him that the regiment has been detailed, which is to render the burial honors above his grave by the thunder of their muskets.  “I will tell him ‘You did right!’” he cries, when she continues to urge him; and he does so!  He realizes that the sovereign who summons him to judge himself, cannot have acted thus toward him, in order to play the Brutus, or from heartless despotism.  It becomes clear to him that war, yes the State itself, rests upon the principle of subordination, and that the commander must first perform in his own person what he would require from his subordinates.  He determines,—­and this too, be it noted, in the presence of the girl he loves,—­to make satisfaction to the offended code of war, and thus crush again the Hydra of anarchy, which his arbitrary action, crowned with victory though it was, might very well lead to.  “And though twelve bullets made you bite the dust this instant,” cries Nathalie transported with admiration, “I could not resist rejoicing, sobbing, crying:  ’Thus you please me.’” Truly she is right; now the man and the hero is complete and never again in all eternity can he be seized with another paroxysm of hollow self-glorification or of petty cowardice—­which, indeed, were intimately connected one with the other.  The Prince has become a stoutly forged link in the moral order of the universe, and the more difficult it was for him, the more firmly he will endure.  Whoever does not find in this scene complete compensation for the preceding one with the Electress—­in which it is rooted like the flower in the black earth; and whoever does not understand at the same time that the one was not possible without the other, and that cause and effect cannot be separated, to that person I must deny all capability of comprehending a drama in its totality.  The change effected by the Elector is one of the most sublime conceptions that any literature can show, and is very far from having an equal in our own.