After three years, I was passing with a gay company through the Swiss town of ——.  In that place is the convent of the Sisterhood of Our Mother of Pity.  The night I stayed there, one of the number died.  I heard of it in the morning, as we were preparing to leave.  From what was said in connection with the circumstance, I knew it was Eudora.  I left my companions to go on by themselves.  I made my way to the convent and begged permission to look on the dead face of my wife.  It was granted.  She was already arrayed for the grave.  I came and threw myself on the lifeless form, and cried as children dry.  The fountains of my heart gave way, the sympathies of my nature were upheaved, and for two hours I wept on unrestrained.  Even consciousness fled for once and left me to the luxury of grief.  At length the worthy people came to me and took me from the room.  I asked many questions, to which they could give me but unsatisfactory replies.  They knew little of Eudora’s history.  She had come directly from my house to this place, and had been remarkable for her acts of untiring benevolence in ministering to the sick and the destitute.  She lost her life from too great exposure in watching at the bedside of a miserable woman whom all the world seemed to have abandoned, and who died of some malignant fever.  I will not attempt to describe what I passed through.  I became sincerely repentant.  I saw my character in its true light.  I prayed that my sins might be forgiven.

The place where Eudora died was not far from the spot where we first met.  I begged the good priest who acted as her confessor to consecrate a little chapel which I should build there, and permit me to place my wife’s remains in it.  He consented.  I caused the image of the Christ which she always wore to be carefully copied in marble and placed before the chapel, and I spent several weeks there, deploring my sins and seeking for light from above.

It was not to be that I should thus easily settle the error of a lifetime.  After a while I felt the desperate gnawing of the senses inexpressible and irresistible.  Satan had come again, and I was called for.  And I went!  There was no escape,—­there is no escape!  Once more I plunged into riotous folly and excess, giving full license to my unbridled appetites,—­but conscious always.  When the fever subsided, I was once more repentant and sorrowful, and I came here,—­only to be carried off again to renew the same wretched scenes.  I know not how long this will last.  I know not if Heaven or Hell will triumph.  Yet, strange as you may think it, I believe I am not so bad a man as when I was a professor in ——­, slowly destroying my lovely wife.  From each paroxysm I fancy I escape somewhat stronger, somewhat more manly than before.  I think, too, my periods of excess are shorter, and of repentance longer; and I sometimes entertain a hope that folly and madness will in me, as in the young, become exhausted, and that beyond still lies the goal of peace and wisdom.