ch he came to publish the work, and gives a deeply interesting account
of the pecuniary embarrassments under which he had for some time been
laboring, and then eloquently defends the publication of what is real,
and glowing in private life and experience.

_To M. de Girardin:_

In addressing to you, my dear Girardin, this third volume of private
notes, to which the public have given the name of _Confidences_, I cannot
repress an emotion of pain. What I foresaw but too well has happened. I
have opened my life, and it has evaporated. This journal of my
impressions has found grace, indulgence, interest even, with some
readers, if I may judge from the anonymous friends who have written me.
But the unsparing critics, men who mingle even our tears with their ink,
in order to give more bitterness to their sarcasms, have not pardoned
those outbursts of a soul of twenty. They have believed, or have
pretended to believe, that I was seeking a miserable celebrity in the
ashes of my own heart: they have said, that by an anticipation of vanity,
I desired to gather and enjoy in advance, while yet living, the sad
Flowers which might one day grow after me upon my tomb. They have cried
out at the profanation of the inner feeling; at the effrontery of a soul
shown naked; at the scandal of recollections made public; at the venality
of sacred things; at the _simony_ of the poet selling his own fibers to
save the roof and the tree that overshadowed his cradle. I have read and
heard in silence all their malign interpretations of an act, the true
nature of which had been revealed to you long before it was to the
public. I have answered nothing. What could I say? The appearances were
against me. You alone knew that these notes had long existed, shut up in
my casket of rosewood, along with the ten volumes of the notes of my
mother; that they were intended never to be taken thence; that I rejected
the first suggestion of publishing them, with all possible warmth of
resolution; that I refused the ransom of a king for those leaves of no
real value; and that finally, one day--a day for which I reproach
myself-constrained fatally to choose between the necessity of selling my
poor _Charmettes_--_Charmettes_, as dear and more holy than the
_Charmettes_ of the _Confessions_--and the necessity of publishing these
pages, I preferred myself to suffer rather than cause suffering to good
old servants, by selling their roofs and their vines to strangers. With