Lamartine has just commenced the publication of a second part of his Confidences, in the feuilleton of La Presse, and precedes it by the following letter to the editor of that paper, which we translate for The International from La Presse of July 30.  It relates to the way in which he came to publish the work, and gives a deeply interesting account of the pecuniary embarrassments under which he had for some time been laboring, and then eloquently defends the publication of what is real, and glowing in private life and experience.

To M. de Girardin:

In addressing to you, my dear Girardin, this third volume of private notes, to which the public have given the name of Confidences, I cannot repress an emotion of pain.  What I foresaw but too well has happened.  I have opened my life, and it has evaporated.  This journal of my impressions has found grace, indulgence, interest even, with some readers, if I may judge from the anonymous friends who have written me.  But the unsparing critics, men who mingle even our tears with their ink, in order to give more bitterness to their sarcasms, have not pardoned those outbursts of a soul of twenty.  They have believed, or have pretended to believe, that I was seeking a miserable celebrity in the ashes of my own heart:  they have said, that by an anticipation of vanity, I desired to gather and enjoy in advance, while yet living, the sad Flowers which might one day grow after me upon my tomb.  They have cried out at the profanation of the inner feeling; at the effrontery of a soul shown naked; at the scandal of recollections made public; at the venality of sacred things; at the simony of the poet selling his own fibers to save the roof and the tree that overshadowed his cradle.  I have read and heard in silence all their malign interpretations of an act, the true nature of which had been revealed to you long before it was to the public.  I have answered nothing.  What could I say?  The appearances were against me.  You alone knew that these notes had long existed, shut up in my casket of rosewood, along with the ten volumes of the notes of my mother; that they were intended never to be taken thence; that I rejected the first suggestion of publishing them, with all possible warmth of resolution; that I refused the ransom of a king for those leaves of no real value; and that finally, one day—­a day for which I reproach myself-constrained fatally to choose between the necessity of selling my poor Charmettes—­Charmettes, as dear and more holy than the Charmettes of the Confessions—­and the necessity of publishing these pages, I preferred myself to suffer rather than cause suffering to good old servants, by selling their roofs and their vines to strangers.  With 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.