one hand I received the price of the _Confidences_, and with the other I
gave it to others in order to purchase time.

Behold here all the crime that I am expiating.

And let the critics rejoice till their vengeance is satiated. This
sacrifice was in vain. It is in vain that I have cast upon the wind these
leaves, torn from the book of my most pious memories. The time that their
price procured has not proved sufficient to conduct me to the threshold
of that abode where we cease to regret anything. My _Charmettes_ have
been sold. Let them be content. I have had the shame of publishing these
_Confidences_, but not the joy of having saved my garden. Steps of
strangers will efface there the steps of my father and mother. God is
God, and sometimes he commands the wind to uproot the oak of a hundred
years, and man to uproot his own heart. The oak and the heart are his, we
must yield them to him, and yield him therewith justice, glory, and
benedictions!

And now that my acceptance of these critics is complete, and that I
confess myself guilty, and still more, afflicted--am I as guilty as they
say, and is there no excuse, which, in the eyes of indulgent and
impartial readers, can extenuate my crime?

In order to judge as to this, I have but one question to ask you, and the
public, which deigns with distracted finger to turn these pages. My
question is this:

Is it to myself, or to others, that the published pages of these
_Confidences_ can have done injury in the view of those who have read
them? Is there a single man now living, is there a single memory of one
of the dead, on whom these recollections have cast an odious or even
unfavorable light, whether on his name, his family, his life, or his
grave? Have they brought sadness to the soul of our mother in the heaven
where she resides? Has the manly face of our father been lessened in the
respect of his descendants? Has _Graziella_, that precocious and withered
flower of my early manhood, received aught beyond a few tears of young
girls shed on a tomb at Portici? Has Julia, the worship of my young
enthusiasm, lost in the imagination of those who know the name, that
purity which she has preserved in my heart? And my masters, those pious
Jesuits, whose name I love not, but whose virtue I venerate; my friends,
dearest and first harvested, Virieu Vignet, the Abbe Dumont, could they
complain, returning here below, that I have disfigured their beautiful
natures, discolored th