I say that I was entirely innocent of the
monstrous and horrible crime, for which twelve honest and conscientious
judges unanimously sentenced me to death. The death sentence was finally
commuted to imprisonment for life in solitary confinement.

It was merely a fatal linking of circumstances, of grave and
insignificant events, of vague silence and indefinite words, which gave
me the appearance and likeness of the criminal, innocent though I was.
But he who would suspect me of being ill-disposed toward my strict
judges would be profoundly mistaken. They were perfectly right,
perfectly right. As people who can judge things and events only by their
appearance, and who are deprived of the ability to penetrate their own
mysterious being, they could not act differently, nor should they have
acted differently.

It so happened that in the game of circumstances, the truth concerning
my actions, which I alone knew, assumed all the features of an insolent
and shameless lie; and however strange it may seem to my kind and
serious reader, I could establish the truth of my innocence only by
falsehood, and not by the truth.

Later on, when I was already in prison, in going over in detail the
story of the crime and the trial, and picturing myself in the place of
one of my judges, I came to the inevitable conclusion each time that
I was guilty. Then I produced a very interesting and instructive work;
having set aside entirely the question of truth and falsehood on
general principles, I subjected the facts and the words to numerous
combinations, erecting structures, even as small children build various
structures with their wooden blocks; and after persistent efforts I
finally succeeded in finding a certain combination of facts which,
though strong in principle, seemed so plausible that my actual innocence
became perfectly clear, exactly and positively established.

To this day I remember the great feeling of astonishment, mingled with
fear, which I experienced at my strange and unexpected discovery; by
telling the truth I lead people into error and thus deceive them, while
by maintaining falsehood I lead them, on the contrary, to the truth and
to knowledge.

I did not yet understand at that time that, like Newton and his famous
apple, I discovered unexpectedly the great law upon which the entire
history of human thought rests, which seeks not the truth, but
verisimilitude, the appearance of truth--that is, the harmony between
that