men.  I had meant to make the happiness of a woman’s life, to love, to be the head of a family, and in this way my need of expiation would have been satisfied to the full.  This design had been thwarted, but yet another way had remained to me,—­I would devote myself henceforward to my child.  But after these two efforts had failed, and scorn and death had darkened my soul for ever, when all my feelings had been wounded and nothing was left to me here on earth, I raised my eyes to heaven, and beheld God.

“Yet still I tried to obtain the sanction of religion for my death.  I went carefully through the Gospels, and found no passage in which suicide was forbidden; but during the reading, the divine thought of Christ, the Saviour of men dawned in me.  Certainly He had said nothing about the immortality of the soul, but He had spoken of the glorious kingdom of His Father; He had nowhere forbidden parricide, but He condemned all that was evil.  The glory of His evangelists, and the proof of their divine mission, is not so much that they made laws for the world, but that they spread a new spirit abroad, and the new laws were filled with this new spirit.  The very courage which a man displays in taking his own life seemed to me to be his condemnation; so long as he felt that he had within himself sufficient strength to die by his own hands, he ought to have had strength enough to continue the struggle.  To refuse to suffer is a sign of weakness rather than of courage, and, moreover, was it not a sort of recusance to take leave of life in despondency, an abjuration of the Christian faith which is based upon the sublime words of Jesus Christ:  ’Blessed are they that mourn.’

“So, in any case, suicide seemed to me to be an unpardonable error, even in the man who, through a false conception of greatness of soul, takes his life a few moments before the executioner’s axe falls.  In humbling himself to the death of the cross, did not Jesus Christ set for us an example of obedience to all human laws, even when carried out unjustly?  The word resignation engraved upon the cross, so clear to the eyes of those who can read the sacred characters in which it is traced, shone for me with divine brightness.

“I still had eighty thousand francs in my possession, and at first I meant to live a remote and solitary life, to vegetate in some country district for the rest of my days; but misanthropy is no Catholic virtue, and there is a certain vanity lurking beneath the hedgehog’s skin of the misanthrope.  His heart does not bleed, it shrivels, and my heart bled from every vein.  I thought of the discipline of the Church, the refuge that she affords to sorrowing souls, understood at last the beauty of a life of prayer in solitude, and was fully determined to ‘enter religion,’ in the grand old phrase.  So far my intentions were firmly fixed, but I had not yet decided on the best means of carrying them out.  I realized the remains of my fortune, and set forth on my journey with an almost tranquil mind. Peace in God was a hope that could never fail me.