“I could not die in peace,” said Veronique, in a voice of deep emotion, “if I suffered the false impression you all have of me to remain.  You see in me a guilty woman, who asks your prayers, and who seeks to make herself worthy of pardon by this public confession of her sin.  That sin was so great, its consequences were so fatal, that perhaps no penance can atone for it.  But the more humiliation I submit to here on earth, the less I may have to dread the wrath of God in the heavenly kingdom to which I am going.  My father, who had great confidence in me, commended to my care (now twenty years ago) a son of this parish, in whom he had seen a great desire to improve himself, an aptitude for study, and fine characteristics.  I mean the unfortunate Jean-Francois Tascheron, who thenceforth attached himself to me as his benefactress.  How did the affection I felt for him become a guilty one?  I think myself excused from explaining this.  Perhaps it could be shown that the purest sentiments by which we act in this world were insensibly diverted from their course by untold sacrifices, by reasons arising from our human frailty, by many causes which might appear to dismiss the evil of my sin.  But even if the noblest affections moved me, was I less guilty?  Rather let me confess that I, who by education, by position in the world, might consider myself superior to the youth my father confided to me, and from whom I was separated by the natural delicacy of our sex,—­I listened, fatally, to the promptings of the devil.  I soon found myself too much the mother of that young man to be insensible to his mute and delicate admiration.  He alone, he first, recognized my true value.  But perhaps a horrible calculation entered my mind.  I thought how discreet a youth would be who owed his all to me, and whom the chances of life had put so far away from me, though we were born equals.  I made even my reputation for benevolence, my pious occupations, a cloak to screen my conduct.  Alas!—­and this is doubtless one of my greatest sins—­I hid my passion under cover of the altar.  The most virtuous of my actions—­the love I bore my mother, the acts of devotion which were sincere and true in the midst of my wrong-doing—­all, all were made to serve the ends of a desperate passion, and were links in the chain that held me.  My poor beloved mother, who hears me now, was for a long time, ignorantly, an accomplice in my sin.  When her eyes were opened, too many dangerous facts existed not to give her mother’s heart the strength to be silent.  Silence with her has been the highest virtue.  Her love for her daughter has gone beyond her love to God.  Ah!  I here discharge her solemnly from the heavy burden of secrecy which she has borne.  She shall end her days without compelling either eyes or brow to lie.  Let her motherhood stand clear of blame; let that noble, sacred old age, crowned with virtue, shine with its natural lustre, freed of that link which bound her indirectly to infamy!”