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 their noble images, or soiled one place in their lives?  I appeal to all who have read.  Would a single shade command me to efface a single line?  Many of whom I have spoken are still living, or their sisters, or their sons, or their friends:  have I humiliated them?  They would have told me.