September 1, 1896. [4]

Do you remember, my faithful friends, and you, my earliest readers, what were the sentiments of hatred, love and fidelity, that inspired the letters which I addressed to you nearly eighteen years ago—­the violence of my hatred for the most tyrannical, and at the same time, the most dangerously vindictive, of European statesmen, viz.  Von Bismarck?

Have you not often smiled, when I then denied the strength of the Colossus and asserted his fragility, when I used to say:  “He must not die with a halo of glory; let him witness rather the bankruptcy of his moral estate and give proof of the pettiness of his character and evidence of his unbridled lust for power.  Let the effrontery of his lies return to him in bitterness?” And together, you and I, we have now seen Prince Bismarck, not hurled down, but slowly crumbling to ruin; there has been nothing great about his fall, neither the shout that he gave, nor his way of falling, nor the words which he said when he picked himself up.

And at the same time when I showed you, in the far distant future, this idol of blood-thirstiness broken, I preached to you the love of Russia.  I saw her freeing herself from German influence and drawing closer to us.  Hardly had the Emperor Alexander III come to the throne, than I said to you:  “He will be a popular Emperor, and the more he loves his own people the more he will love ours.”  For a long time you thought that my hatred of Prince Bismarck was blind, but from the outset you regarded my love of Russia as enlightened.  How many strengthening and encouraging letters have I not received from you?

And now, Nicholas II, son of Alexander III, the well-beloved Emperor, who represents in his own person the highest expression of great, holy and mystical Russia, is coming to Paris officially, as the ally of France, so that all the ambitions of our patriotism, all our dreams of the last twenty-five years, are coming true together.  Am I not entitled to say to you, dear readers, “I have fulfilled the mission that I set before myself, my work amongst you is accomplished”?  But there remains still a tie between us, our common fidelity to Alsace!  How could we forget those who have not ceased to remember?  Shall it be said that we failed those who rather than yield have suffered every form of torture?  Let us endeavour together to prove in a more active manner our devotion to the brethren who are separated from us.  Now that Prince Bismarck has one foot in the grave, now that the Russian Alliance is in the hands of the Government of France, let us devote all our strength and all the resources of our advocacy, all our love of justice, to the cause of Alsace-Lorraine. . . .