No!  I have embalmed only pure recollections.  My shroud was poor, but it was spotless.  The modest name I have wrapped there for myself will neither be adorned nor dishonored by it.  No tenderness will reproach me; no family will accuse me of profanation in naming it.  A remembrance is an inviolable thing because it is voiceless, and must be approached with piety.  I could never console myself if I had allowed to fall from this life into that other life, whence no one can answer, one word which could wound those absent immortals whom we call the dead.  I desire that not a single word, thoughtfully uttered, should remain after me against one of the men who will one day be my survivors.  Posterity is not the sewer of our passions—­it is the urn of our memories, and should preserve nothing but perfumes.

These Confidences have then done injury or caused pain to no one, among the living or among the dead.  I mistake, they have done injury to me, but to me alone.  I have depicted myself such as I was:  one of those natures, alas! so common among the children of women, wrought not of one clay only, not of that purified and exceptional substance which forms heroes, saints, and sages, but moulded of every earth which enters into the formation of the weak and passionate man; of lofty aspirations, and narrow wings; of great desires, and short hands to reach whither they are extended; sublime in ideal, vulgar in reality; with fire in the heart, illusion in the mind, and tears in the eyes; human statues, which attest by the diversity of the elements that compose them, the mysterious failings of our poor nature; in which, as in the metal of Corinth, we find after the fire the traces of all the melted metals which were mingled and confounded in it, a little gold and much lead.  But, I repeat, whom have I injured but myself?

But they say, these unvailed exposures of sentiments and of life offend that virginal modesty of soul, of which outward modesty is but an imperfect emblem?  You show ourself unvailed, and you do not blush!  Who then are you?

Alas!  I am what you see, a poor writer; a writer, that is to say, a thinker, in public.  I am, less their genius and virtue, what were St. Augustine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Montaigne, all those men Who have silently interrogated their souls and replied aloud, so that their dialogue with themselves might also be a useful conversation with the century in which they lived, or with the future.  The human heart is an instrument which has neither the same number nor quality of chords in every bosom, and on which new notes may eternally be discovered and added to the infinite scale of sentiments and melodies in the universe.  This is our part, poets and writers in spite of ourselves, rhapsodists of the endless poem that nature chants to men and God!  Why accuse me, if you excuse yourselves?  Are we not of the same family of the Homeridae, who from door to door recount histories, of which they are by turns