apology necessary if
this book had any pretension to be considered a regular memoir of
my life, is that there are many gaps in it. The person who had the
greatest influence on my life, my sister Henriette, is scarcely
mentioned in it.[1] In September 1862, a year after the death of this
invaluable friend, I wrote for the few persons who had known her well,
a short notice of her life. Only a hundred copies were printed. My
sister was so unassuming, and she was so averse from the stress
and stir of the world that I should have fancied I could hear her
reproaching me from her grave, if I had made this sketch public
property. I have more than once been tempted to include it in this
volume, but on second thoughts I have felt that to do so would be an
act of profanation. The pamphlet in question was read and appreciated
by a few persons who were kindly disposed towards her and towards
myself. It would be wrong of me to expose a memory so sacred in my
eyes to the supercilious criticisms which are part and parcel of the
right acquired by the purchaser of a book. It seemed to me that in
placing the lines referring to her in a book for the trade I should
be acting with as much impropriety as if I sent a portrait of her for
sale to an auction room. The pamphlet in question will not, therefore,
be reprinted until after my death, appended to it, very possibly being
several of her letters selected by me beforehand. The natural sequence
of this book, which is neither more nor less than the sequence in the
various periods of my life, brings about a sort of contrast between
the anecdotes of Brittany and those of the Seminary, the latter
being the details of a darksome struggle, full of reasonings and
hard scholasticism, while the recollections of my earlier years are
instinct with the impressions of childlike sensitiveness, of candour,
of innocence, and of affection. There is nothing surprising about
this contrast. Nearly all of us are double. The more a man develops
intellectually, the stronger is his attraction to the opposite pole:
that is to say, to the irrational, to the repose of mind in absolute
ignorance, to the woman who is merely a woman, the instinctive being
who acts solely from the impulse of an obscure conscience. The fierce
school of controversy, in which the mind of Europe has been involved
since the time of Abelard, induces periods of mental drought and
aridity. The brain, parched by reasoning, thirsts for simplicity, li