I do not know whether I ought to tire the attention of the reader with the story of other events of a similar nature.  I shall mention but briefly that one after another my friends, who remained my friends from the time when I was happy and free, stopped visiting me.  According to their words, they believed in my innocence, and at first warmly expressed to me their sympathy.  But our lives, mine in prison and theirs at liberty, were so different that gradually under the pressure of perfectly natural causes, such as forgetfulness, official and other duties, the absence of mutual interests, they visited me ever more and more rarely, and finally ceased to see me entirely.  I cannot recall without a smile that even the death of my mother, even the betrayal of the girl I loved did not arouse in me such a hopelessly bitter feeling as these gentlemen, whose names I remember but vaguely now, succeeded in wresting from my soul.

“What horror!  What pain!  My friends, you have left me alone!  My friends, do you understand what you have done?  You have left me alone.  Can you conceive of leaving a human being alone?  Even a serpent has its mate, even a spider has its comrade—­and you have left a human being alone!  You have given him a soul—­and left him alone!  You have given him a heart, a mind, a hand for a handshake, lips for a kiss—­and you have left him alone!  What shall he do now that you have left him alone?”

Thus I exclaimed in my “Diary of a Prisoner,” tormented by woeful perplexities.  In my juvenile blindness, in the pain of my young, senseless heart, I still did not want to understand that the solitude, of which I complained so bitterly, like the mind, was an advantage given to man over other creatures, in order to fence around the sacred mysteries of his soul from the stranger’s gaze.

Let my serious reader consider what would have become of life if man were robbed of his right, of his duty to be alone.  In the gathering of idle chatterers, amid the dull collection of transparent glass dolls, that kill each other with their sameness; in the wild city where all doors are open, and all windows are open—­passers-by look wearily through the glass walls and observe the same evidences of the hearth and the alcove.  Only the creatures that can be alone possess a face; while those that know no solitude—­the great, blissful, sacred solitude of the soul—­have snouts instead of faces.

And in calling my friends “perfidious traitors” I, poor youth that I was, could not understand the wise law of life, according to which neither friendship, nor love, nor even the tenderest attachment of sister and mother, is eternal.  Deceived by the lies of the poets, who proclaimed eternal friendship and love, I did not want to see that which my indulgent reader observes from the windows of his dwelling—­how friends, relatives, mother and wife, in apparent despair and in tears, follow their dead to the cemetery, and