“I suppose no one will dare to break the seal of a packet addressed to you.  In this belief I bid you adieu, offering you my best respects for the last time, and begging you to believe that in writing to you I am giving you a token of my gratitude for all the kindness you have shown to your deceased humble servant,

“LUCIEN DE R.”

“To the Abbe Carlos Herrera.

“MY DEAR ABBE,—­I have had only benefits from you, and I have betrayed you.  This involuntary ingratitude is killing me, and when you read these lines I shall have ceased to exist.  You are not here now to save me.

“You had given me full liberty, if I should find it advantageous, to destroy you by flinging you on the ground like a cigar-end; but I have ruined you by a blunder.  To escape from a difficulty, deluded by a clever question from the examining judge, your son by adoption and grace went over to the side of those who aim at killing you at any cost, and insist on proving an identity, which I know to be impossible, between you and a French villain.  All is said.

“Between a man of your calibre and me—­me of whom you tried to make a greater man than I am capable of being—­no foolish sentiment can come at the moment of final parting.  You hoped to make me powerful and famous, and you have thrown me into the gulf of suicide, that is all.  I have long heard the broad pinions of that vertigo beating over my head.

“As you have sometimes said, there is the posterity of Cain and the posterity of Abel.  In the great human drama Cain is in opposition.  You are descended from Adam through that line, in which the devil still fans the fire of which the first spark was flung on Eve.  Among the demons of that pedigree, from time to time we see one of stupendous power, summing up every form of human energy, and resembling the fevered beasts of the desert, whose vitality demands the vast spaces they find there.  Such men are as dangerous as lions would be in the heart of Normandy; they must have their prey, and they devour common men and crop the money of fools.  Their sport is so dangerous that at last they kill the humble dog whom they have taken for a companion and made an idol of.

“When it is God’s will, these mysterious beings may be a Moses, an Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet, or Napoleon; but when He leaves a generation of these stupendous tools to rust at the bottom of the ocean, they are no more than a Pugatschef, a Fouche, a Louvel, or the Abbe Carlos Herrera.  Gifted with immense power over tenderer souls, they entrap them and mangle them.  It is grand, it is fine —­in its way.  It is the poisonous plant with gorgeous coloring that fascinates children in the woods.  It is the poetry of evil.  Men like you ought to dwell in caves and never come out of them.  You have made me live that vast life, and I have had all my share of existence; so I may