“Within the last few days I have also received your dear letter of the 2nd of December, my kind mother, and the grind-duke’s commission has deigned to let me also read my kind brother’s letter which accompanied yours.  You give me the best of news in regard to the health of all of you, and send me preserved fruits from our dear home.  I thank you for them from the bottom of my heart.  What causes me most joy in the matter is that you have been solicitously busy about me in summer as in winter, and that you and my dear Julia gathered them and prepared them for me at home, and I abandon my whole soul to that sweet enjoyment.

“I rejoice sincerely at my little cousin’s coming into the world; I joyfully congratulate the good parents and the grandparents; I transport myself, for his baptism, into that beloved parish, where I offer him my affection as his Christian brother, and call down on him all the blessings of heaven.

“We shall be obliged, I think, to give up this correspondence, so as not to inconvenience the grand-duke’s commission.  I finish, therefore, by assuring you, once more, but for the last time, perhaps, of my profound filial submission and of my fraternal affection.—­Your most tenderly attached “Karl-Ludwig sand.”

Indeed, from that moment all correspondence between Karl and his family ceased, and he only wrote to them, when he knew his fate, one more letter, which we shall see later on.

We have seen by what attentions Sand was surrounded; their humanity never flagged for an instant.  It is the truth, too, that no one saw in him an ordinary murderer, that many pitied him under their breath, and that some excused him aloud.  The very commission appointed by the grand-duke prolonged the affair as much as possible; for the severity of Sand’s wounds had at first given rise to the belief that there would be no need of calling in the executioner, and the commission was well pleased that God should have undertaken the execution of the judgment.  But these expectations were deceived:  the skill of the doctor defeated, not indeed the wound, but death:  Sand did not recover, but he remained alive; and it began to be evident that it would be needful to kill him.

Indeed, the Emperor Alexander, who had appointed Kotzebue his councillor, and who was under no misapprehension as to the cause of the murder, urgently demanded that justice should take its course.  The commission of inquiry was therefore obliged to set to work; but as its members were sincerely desirous of having some pretext to delay their proceedings, they ordered that a physician from Heidelberg should visit Sand and make an exact report upon his case; as Sand was kept lying down and as he could not be executed in his bed, they hoped that the physician’s report, by declaring it impossible for the prisoner to rise, would come to their assistance and necessitate a further respite.

The chosen doctor came accordingly to Mannheim, and introducing himself to Sand as though attracted by the interest that he inspired, asked him whether he did not feel somewhat better, and whether it would be impossible to rise.  Sand looked at him for an instant, and then said, with a smile—­