Le Message is a brief, poignant tale about the delivery of a last wish. The narrator, a young man traveling by stagecoach, strikes up a friendship with another passenger of his age during the journey. A coach accident occurs, and the companion, mortally wounded, has only time to entrust the narrator with a final mission: to inform the woman he secretly loved — a married countess — of his death, and to return to her the letters that might compromise her. The young man accepts this funereal bequest and undertakes to announce the news himself to the stranger. The heart of the story is this delicate encounter: how to tell a woman of the death of her lover, how to bring her both grief and the protection of her honor. The narrator acquits himself of his task with tact and compassion, sharing for an instant the mute sorrow of this woman who must weep in secret, unable to display her mourning or confess her love. Balzac captures the particular cruelty of clandestine loves, condemned to secrecy even in death, and the fleeting solidarity that can arise between strangers around a shared sorrow. Of great sobriety, the tale illustrates the novelist's talent for brief situations charged with emotion, in which a simple message overturns lives. It belongs to Balzac's depiction of feelings thwarted by social convention, and shows, in a few pages, all the melancholy of passions doomed to silence. The motif of the last errand entrusted to a stranger, and of grief that must remain hidden, makes this text one of the most touching miniatures of the Scenes of Private Life.