In the midst of our solitude, each day brings a new joy that makes you dearer to my heart. Thus the pearls of the sea owe their imperishable lustre to the shadows of each succeeding wave. You often tell me, Marie, that my nature is noble, generous, and, above all, good. When you will have read this journal of my whole life, Marie, my beautiful and gentle Marie, you will find out that I have often been hard-hearted and wicked. That goodness for which you praise me, it is to you that I owe it! Under your holy influence, my beautiful guardian angel, all my bad instincts have disappeared, all my highest sentiments have been exalted; in a word I have loved you, I love you now as you deserve to be loved. To love you thus, and to be loved by you, Marie, is to believe oneself the first and noblest of men, to despise glory, ambition, fortune, to feel above them all. It is to have gone beyond the limits of all possible happiness. This superhuman happiness would alarm me, had we not purchased it by your sorrow and remorse, poor Marie! This remorse has been, and still is, your only grief; the time has come to deliver you from it. You shall be told the truth about the man you married, whom you have believed to be in prison as a political criminal, for these last two years. Later you will know why I hid this secret from you until now. These lines which I now write in this journal retrace almost all the events of my life, up to the moment when we quitted Serval together. They will be the last I shall write in it. Why should I henceforth need such a cold confidant? It is in your angelic heart, Marie, that I will trace all my thoughts; or, rather, it is there that I will leave the imprint of the perfect bliss that intoxicates me. You will read this journal, Marie; you will see that I have been very guilty, that I have suffered greatly. You will read the story of our love from its very inception. Since leaving Serval I have ceased to write in this journal. What could I have written? Whatever I have said, Marie, will apply to the future years I shall spend with you. You will not find here the date of the birth of our Arthur,--our child,--the greatest joy of my life. Nor will you find the date of that terrible day on which I trembled for your life, my day of most fearful torture. While the paroxysm of that unknown joy, of that unknown grief, lasted, I neither thought, reflected, nor acted, I did not exist. When one still has the consciousness of one's sufferings, when one can contemplate one's own joy, then neither has joy nor sorrow arrived at its highest degree. I had thus far suffered atrociously. I had experienced the most intense delights, but I had never been so absorbed as to lose self-consciousness, or the power of self-investigation.