all. In 1848 the Duke had the bad taste to ask for his resignation,
but the Empire repaired the injury. Alfred de Musset died in Paris, May
2, 1857.

HENRI DE BORNIER
de l'Academie Francaise.

THE CONFESSIONS OF A CHILD OF THE CENTURY

BOOK 1.

PART I

CHAPTER I. TO THE READER

Before the history of any life can be written, that life must be lived;
so that it is not my life that I am now writing. Attacked in early youth
by an abominable moral malady, I here narrate what happened to me during
the space of three years. Were I the only victim of that disease, I
would say nothing, but as many others suffer from the same evil, I write
for them, although I am not sure that they will give heed to me. Should
my warning be unheeded, I shall still have reaped the fruit of my
agonizing in having cured myself, and, like the fox caught in a trap,
shall have gnawed off my captive foot.

CHAPTER II. REFLECTIONS

During the wars of the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in
Germany, anxious mothers gave birth to an ardent, pale, and neurotic
generation. Conceived between battles, reared amid the noises of war,
thousands of children looked about them with dull eyes while testing
their limp muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers would
appear, raise them to their gold-laced bosoms, then place them on the
ground and remount their horses.

The life of Europe centred in one man; men tried to fill their lungs
with the air which he had breathed. Yearly France presented that man
with three hundred thousand of her youth; it was the tax to Caesar;
without that troop behind him, he could not follow his fortune. It was
the escort he needed that he might scour the world, and then fall in a
little valley on a deserted island, under weeping willows.

Never had there been so many sleepless nights as in the time of that
man; never had there been seen, hanging over the ramparts of the cities,
such a nation of desolate mothers; never was there such a silence about
those who spoke of death. And yet there was never such joy, such life,
such fanfares of war, in all hearts. Never was there such pure sunlight
as that which dried all this blood. God made the sun for this man,
men said; and they called it the Sun of Austerlitz. But he made this
sunlight himself with his ever-booming guns that left no clouds but
those which succeed the day of battle.

It was this ai