Such has been my conviction ever since I entered upon a career in which the public has shown me such undeserved encouragement; and with such a purpose, and for such an object, have I always written. In some works I have striven alone to impress those general principles of honour and virtue, and those high and elevated feelings, which do not seem to me to be increasing in the world. In others, I have endeavoured to advocate, without seeming too much to do so, some particular principle, or to warn against some particular error. In the following pages my purpose was to expose the evil consequences of an ill-regulated spirit of enterprise and a love of adventure, and to deter from errors, the magnitude of which I may have felt by sharing in them. To do so, it was necessary to choose as my subject the life of a young man placed in circumstances of difficulty and temptation; and no writer can ever hope to produce a good effect by painting man otherwise than man is. At the same time I have ever been convinced that no benefit can ensue from drawing the mind of the reader through long scenes of vice and guilt, for the sake of a short moral at the end; and in writing the history of the Count de l'Orme, I determined to show, as was absolutely necessary, that he was led by the love of adventure into error nearly approaching to guilt: but to dwell upon his errors no longer than was absolutely required; to point out, even while I related them, that their consequences were terrible; and to make the great bulk of the book display a life of regret, pain and difficulty, consequent upon the fault I sought to reprehend. This I have done to the best of my judgment, restricting all details of the error into which the principal character of the book fell, to some ten or twelve pages. Having read those pages again, after a lapse of many years, with the deepest attention and consideration, I send them forth with scarcely an alteration; being firmly convinced, that the mind which can contract any evil from the terrible scene which they depict--a scene which, I have every reason to believe, really occurred--must be foul and corrupt ere it sits down to the perusal. One thing I certainly know, that those pages were written in the spirit of purity, and with the purpose of good; and I will never believe that such feelings can generate, in the breast of others, likewise pure, aught but their own likeness. De l'Orme was first published in 1830, and was written while I was residing in France. The incidents, however, had been collected and arranged long before, and only required form and compression. For some curious details regarding the battle of Sedan I was indebted to a gentleman of that city, and I believe the facts of the famous revolt of the Count of Soissons will be found historically correct, even to very minute particulars. DE L'ORME. CHAPTER I.