so on earth, for _he_ is generous and
will forgive me. You see I am ever selfish; is it not the proof of
a despotic love? I wish you to still love me in mine. Unable to be
yours in life, I bequeath to you my thoughts and also my duties.
If you do not wish to marry Madeleine you will at least seek the
repose of my soul by making Monsieur de Mortsauf as happy as he
ever can be.

Farewell, dear child of my heart; this is the farewell of a mind
absolutely sane, still full of life; the farewell of a spirit on
which thou hast shed too many and too great joys to suffer thee to
feel remorse for the catastrophe they have caused. I use that word
"catastrophe" thinking of you and how you love me; as for me, I
reach the haven of my rest, sacrificed to duty and not without
regret--ah! I tremble at that thought. God knows better than I
whether I have fulfilled his holy laws in accordance with their
spirit. Often, no doubt, I have tottered, but I have not fallen;
the most potent cause of my wrong-doing lay in the grandeur of the
seductions that encompassed me. The Lord will behold me trembling
when I enter His presence as though I had succumbed. Farewell
again, a long farewell like that I gave last night to our dear
valley, where I soon shall rest and where you will often--will you
not?--return.

Henriette.

I fell into an abyss of terrible reflections, as I perceived the depths
unknown of the life now lighted up by this expiring flame. The clouds of
my egotism rolled away. She had suffered as much as I--more than I, for
she was dead. She believed that others would be kind to her friend;
she was so blinded by love that she had never so much as suspected the
enmity of her daughter. That last proof of her tenderness pained
me terribly. Poor Henriette wished to give me Clochegourde and her
daughter.

Natalie, from that dread day when first I entered a graveyard following
the remains of my noble Henriette, whom now you know, the sun has been
less warm, less luminous, the nights more gloomy, movement less agile,
thought more dull. There are some departed whom we bury in the
earth, but there are others more deeply loved for whom our souls are
winding-sheets, whose memory mingles daily with our heart-beats; we
think of them as we breathe; they are in us by the tender law of a
metempsychosis special to love. A soul is within my soul. When some good
thing is done by me, when some true word is s