Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by the question whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its ultimate publication.  This seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working of the human mind.

Those who find one of the world’s puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily.  Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty confessional.  Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest, will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree.  There is no more mystery in it than in the singing of birds.  The motive may be either to obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up the very echoes and last drops of pleasure.  Human beings keep diaries for as many different reasons as they write lyric poems.  With Pepys, I fancy, the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure.  The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone.  True, in the early days his confidences are innocent enough.  Pepys began to write in cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive man.  Having built, however, this secret and solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring.  He had discovered a room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud.  Here we see the respectable man liberated.  He no longer needs to be on his official behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the safety of shorthand.  And how he takes advantage of his opportunities!  He remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his public carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed.  He never, it must be admitted, entirely shakes off his timidity.  At a crisis he dare not confess in English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush.  In some instances the French may be for facetiousness rather than concealment, as in the reference to the ladies of Rochester Castle in 1665: 

Thence to Rochester, walked to the Crowne, and while dinner was getting ready, I did then walk to visit the old Castle ruines, which hath been a noble place, and there going up I did upon the stairs overtake three pretty mayds or women and took them up with me, and I did baiser sur mouches et toucher leur mains and necks to my great pleasure; but lord! to see what a dreadfull thing it is to look down the precipices, for it did fright me mightily, and hinder me of much pleasure which I would have made to myself in the company of these three, if it had not been for that.

Even here, however, Mr. Pepys’s French has a suggestion of evasion.  He always had a faint hope that his conscience would not understand French.