o be
intrusted with the truth. Behold me, then, alone with conspirators!
Alas! as the years went on, my illusions left me. Surrounded as I was by
the fervent disciples and apologists of revolution, I beheld them daily
advance in confidence and desperation; I beheld myself, upon the other
hand, and with an almost equal regularity, decline in faith. I had
sacrificed all to further that cause in which I still believed; and
daily I began to grow in doubts if we were advancing it indeed. Horrible
was the society with which we warred, but our own means were not less
horrible.

"I will not dwell upon my sufferings; I will not pause to tell you how,
when I beheld young men still free and happy, married, fathers of
children, cheerfully toiling at their work, my heart reproached me with
the greatness and vanity of my unhappy sacrifice. I will not describe to
you how, worn by poverty, poor lodging, scanty food, and an unquiet
conscience, my health began to fail, and in the long nights, as I
wandered bedless in the rainy streets, the most cruel sufferings of the
body were added to the tortures of my mind. These things are not
personal to me; they are common to all unfortunates in my position. An
oath, so light a thing to swear, so grave a thing to break: an oath,
taken in the heat of youth, repented with what sobbings of the heart,
but yet in vain repented, as the years go on: an oath, that was once the
very utterance of the truth of God, but that falls to be the symbol of a
meaningless and empty slavery; such is the yoke that many young men
joyfully assume, and under whose dead weight they live to suffer worse
than death.

"It is not that I was patient. I have begged to be released; but I knew
too much, and I was still refused. I have fled; ay, and for the time
successfully. I reached Paris. I found a lodging in the Rue St. Jacques,
almost opposite the Val de Grace. My room was mean and bare, but the sun
looked into it towards evening; it commanded a peep of a green garden; a
bird hung by a neighbour's window and made the morning beautiful; and I,
who was sick, might lie in bed and rest myself: I, who was in full
revolt against the principles that I had served, was now no longer at
the beck of the council, and was no longer charged with shameful and
revolting tasks. Oh! what an interval of peace was that! I still dream,
at times, that I can hear the note of my neighbour's bird.

"My money was running out, and it became necessar