And yet I was not of a hateful or spiteful disposition. I was filled with the most pleasurable sensations when I had secretly rendered any one a service that I was not afraid of having to blush for. Then I loved to contemplate the beauties of nature, which is a sentiment that thoroughly wicked and perverse souls are not capable of. The sight of a magnificent sunset gave me intense delight. I was happy when I found the description of noble and generous actions in the books I read, and the deep sympathy I felt proved that all the noble cords of my heart were not yet broken. As much as I admired Walter Scott, that sublime benefactor of unhappy minds, whose genius leaves one so refreshed and purified, just so much did I detest Byron, whose sterile and desolating scepticism only leaves a taste of gall and bitterness. I had so just an appreciation of every kind of trouble or affliction that I carried my delicacy and fear of wounding the feelings of the unfortunate or lonely to a ridiculous length. I was seized with pity and tenderness for no apparent reason. I felt sometimes an immense need of loving some one, of devoting my life to some one. My first impulses were always sincere and unselfish; but then came reflections and second thoughts to blight everything. There was a perpetual struggle going on in my mind and heart. One said: Believe, love, hope; and the other said; Doubt, despise, fear. I was in this way constantly impelled by two opposite forces. I seemed to feel with my mother's heart and think with my father's mind; but the intellect was always stronger than the affections. I also possessed the terrible faculty of comparing myself with others, by the aid of which I found a thousand reasons why I was not lovable, consequently I considered every one in the light of a flatterer. My mother had adored me, and I had forgotten my mother; or, rather, I only thought of her when I was in desperate trouble. But when I was completely happy, when my vanity was satisfied, and I was dazzled with my own importance, all such pious recollections as I had momentarily evoked vanished into the shade of the maternal tomb. I owed everything to my father, and I only remembered him to curse the fatal experience he had given me. Hélène had loved me with the truest and purest affection, and I had returned her innocent love by insult and suspicion. Thus being always ungrateful, suspicious, and forgetful, what right had I to expect from others love and devotion? In vain I would say to myself: "My father, my mother, and Hélène loved me just as I was; why, then, should not others do the same?" But my father was my father, my mother was my mother, and Hélène was Hélène (for I very properly placed Hélène's love for me among the innate, natural family affections). And yet the aversion with which I had inspired her had been so great that the love she had borne me in her heart from her earliest childhood was destroyed in a day.