r grief may have been, that alone
was not enough to cause her death; the real cause was her advanced age
and a series of illnesses which had undermined her once strong and
sound organism. In the name of justice, I must say that my father, a
weak-charactered man, was not at all a model husband and family man; by
numerous betrayals, by falsehood and deception he had led my mother
to despair, constantly offending her pride and her strict, unbribable
truthfulness. But at that time I did not understand it; the death of my
mother seemed to me one of the most cruel manifestations of universal
injustice, and called forth a new stream of useless and sacrilegious
curses.

I do not know whether I ought to tire the attention of the reader with
the story of other events of a similar nature. I shall mention but
briefly that one after another my friends, who remained my friends from
the time when I was happy and free, stopped visiting me. According
to their words, they believed in my innocence, and at first warmly
expressed to me their sympathy. But our lives, mine in prison and theirs
at liberty, were so different that gradually under the pressure of
perfectly natural causes, such as forgetfulness, official and other
duties, the absence of mutual interests, they visited me ever more and
more rarely, and finally ceased to see me entirely. I cannot recall
without a smile that even the death of my mother, even the betrayal of
the girl I loved did not arouse in me such a hopelessly bitter feeling
as these gentlemen, whose names I remember but vaguely now, succeeded in
wresting from my soul.

"What horror! What pain! My friends, you have left me alone! My friends,
do you understand what you have done? You have left me alone. Can you
conceive of leaving a human being alone? Even a serpent has its mate,
even a spider has its comrade--and you have left a human being alone!
You have given him a soul--and left him alone! You have given him a
heart, a mind, a hand for a handshake, lips for a kiss--and you have
left him alone! What shall he do now that you have left him alone?"

Thus I exclaimed in my "Diary of a Prisoner," tormented by woeful
perplexities. In my juvenile blindness, in the pain of my young,
senseless heart, I still did not want to understand that the solitude,
of which I complained so bitterly, like the mind, was an advantage
given to man over other creatures, in order to fence around the sacred
mysteries of his soul from the