e so many daring people have found
their heroic, but, alas! fruitless, death.

And if the tone of my confessions may sometimes seem too positive to my
indulgent reader, it is not at all due to the absence of modesty in me,
but it is due to the fact that I firmly believe that I am right, and
also to my firm desire to be useful to my neighbour as far as my faint
powers permit.

Here I must apologise for my frequent references to my "Diary of a
Prisoner," which is unknown to the reader; but the fact is that I
consider the complete publication of my "Diary" too premature and
perhaps even dangerous. Begun during the remote period of cruel
disillusions, of the shipwreck of all my beliefs and hopes, breathing
boundless despair, my note book bears evidence in places that its author
was, if not in a state of complete insanity, on the brink of insanity.
And if we recall how contagious that illness is, my caution in the use
of my "Diary" will become entirely clear.

O, blooming youth! With an involuntary tear in my eye I recall your
magnificent dreams, your daring visions and outbursts, your impetuous,
seething power--but I should not want your return, blooming youth!
Only with the greyness of the hair comes clear wisdom, and that
great aptitude for unprejudiced reflection which makes of all old men
philosophers and often even sages.

CHAPTER II

Those of my kind visitors who honour me by expressing their delight and
even--may this little indiscretion be forgiven me!--even their adoration
of my spiritual clearness, can hardly imagine what I was when I came to
this prison. The tens of years which have passed over my head and
which have whitened my hair cannot muffle the slight agitation which
I experience at the recollection of the first moments when, with the
creaking of the rusty hinges, the fatal prison doors opened and then
closed behind me forever.

Not endowed with literary talent, which in reality is an indomitable
inclination to invent and to lie, I shall attempt to introduce myself to
my indulgent reader exactly as I was at that remote time.

I was a young man, twenty-seven years of age--as I had occasion to
mention before--unrestrained, impetuous, given to abrupt deviations. A
certain dreaminess, peculiar to my age; a self-respect which was easily
offended and which revolted at the slightest insignificant provocation;
a passionate impetuosity in solving world problems; fits of melancholy
alternated by equal