Translation:Letter to the press
The correspondents have lied. My four lectures were applauded and will be fruitful.
After the last one, yesterday evening, I read the article in L'Intransigeant, and all night long, I wondered whether, instead of leaving for Jersey, I shouldn’t go back to Paris to settle things once and for all with my most relentless slanderer. He doesn’t sign his name, but I know who he is.
By morning, I had returned to my old resolution not to go back to prison over a pointless quarrel.
So I was about to head toward Saint-Malo when I read the Brest newspapers that had just come out. They announced yet another explosion and reported that the commissaires had to visit militant anarchists last night—"and if necessary, arrest them all" (sic).
I am no Rochefort: I’m coming back! If all anarchists are going to be locked up, then I want to be among them.
I’m reading last night’s Paris papers on the train. Almost all of them are asking why I am free. I am free because no one has the right to arrest me, much to the displeasure of the scholars at Les Débats, who would do well to read the 1881 press law: they’d see that arrest is forbidden until the Court of Cassation has ruled on the appeal.
Anyway, here I am—let them come and take me! Otherwise, Mr. Loubet, for Mr. Laurent, will remain Mr. Soliveau.
And now I find myself mixed up in a cabinet crisis! It would be curious if I ended up toppling a ministry!
What would be even more curious is this: me—who was not loved as a child by those who brought me into this world, though I didn’t deserve it; who, as an adolescent, was imprisoned, though I didn’t deserve it; who, having become a sincere, convinced anarchist (oh yes, convinced!)—convinced that radiant anarchy means there will no longer be dark lives like mine—having endured the pain of being called a fed, though I didn’t deserve it… Yes, it would be very curious if I were punished for acts I did not commit! Then I could say, like Orestes: "… and my fate is fulfilled!"
Well, here I come! Anarchy! Anarchy!
Yours:
Martinet.
6, rue des Écoles, Paris.