eir noble images, or soiled one place in their
lives? I appeal to all who have read. Would a single shade command me to
efface a single line? Many of whom I have spoken are still living, or
their sisters, or their sons, or their friends: have I humiliated them?
They would have told me.

No! I have embalmed only pure recollections. My shroud was poor, but it
was spotless. The modest name I have wrapped there for myself will
neither be adorned nor dishonored by it. No tenderness will reproach me;
no family will accuse me of profanation in naming it. A remembrance is an
inviolable thing because it is voiceless, and must be approached with
piety. I could never console myself if I had allowed to fall from this
life into that other life, whence no one can answer, one word which could
wound those absent immortals whom we call the dead. I desire that not a
single word, thoughtfully uttered, should remain after me against one of
the men who will one day be my survivors. Posterity is not the sewer of
our passions--it is the urn of our memories, and should preserve nothing
but perfumes.

These _Confidences_ have then done injury or caused pain to no one, among
the living or among the dead. I mistake, they have done injury to me, but
to me alone. I have depicted myself such as I was: one of those natures,
alas! so common among the children of women, wrought not of one clay
only, not of that purified and exceptional substance which forms heroes,
saints, and sages, but moulded of every earth which enters into the
formation of the weak and passionate man; of lofty aspirations, and
narrow wings; of great desires, and short hands to reach whither they are
extended; sublime in ideal, vulgar in reality; with fire in the heart,
illusion in the mind, and tears in the eyes; human statues, which attest
by the diversity of the elements that compose them, the mysterious
failings of our poor nature; in which, as in the metal of Corinth, we
find after the fire the traces of all the melted metals which were
mingled and confounded in it, a little gold and much lead. But, I repeat,
whom have I injured but myself?

But they say, these unvailed exposures of sentiments and of life offend
that virginal modesty of soul, of which outward modesty is but an
imperfect emblem? You show ourself unvailed, and you do not blush! Who
then are you?

Alas! I am what you see, a poor writer; a writer, that is to say, a
thinker, in public. I am, less their genius a