ved
everything, not to separate from her; that after passing with her twenty
years in despite of fate and men; I have in my old age made her my wife,
without the least expectation or solicitation on her part, or promise or
engagement on mine, the world will think that love bordering upon
madness, having from the first moment turned my head, led me by degrees
to the last act of extravagance; and this will no longer appear doubtful
when the strong and particular reasons which should forever have
prevented me from taking such a step are made known. What, therefore,
will the reader think when I shall have told him, with all the truth he
has ever found in me, that, from the first moment in which I saw her,
until that wherein I write, I have never felt the least love for her,
that I never desired to possess her more than I did to possess Madam de
Warrens, and that the physical wants which were satisfied with her person
were, to me, solely those of the sex, and by no means proceeding from the
individual? He will think that, being of a constitution different from
that of other men, I was incapable of love, since this was not one of the
sentiments which attached me to women the most dear to my heart.
Patience, O my dear reader! the fatal moment approaches in which you
will be but too much undeceived.

I fall into repetitions; I know it; and these are necessary. The first
of my wants, the greatest, strongest and most insatiable, was wholly in
my heart; the want of an intimate connection, and as intimate as it could
possibly be: for this reason especially, a woman was more necessary to me
than a man, a female rather than a male friend. This singular want was
such that the closest corporal union was not sufficient: two souls would
have been necessary to me in the same body, without which I always felt a
void. I thought I was upon the point of filling it up forever. This
young person, amiable by a thousand excellent qualities, and at that time
by her form, without the shadow of art or coquetry, would have confined
within herself my whole existence, could hers, as I had hoped it would,
have been totally confined to me. I had nothing to fear from men; I am
certain of being the only man she ever really loved and her moderate
passions seldom wanted another not even after I ceased in this respect to
be one to her. I had no family; she had one; and this family was
composed of individuals whose dispositions were so different from m