My name is Charles Rochebrune. I am no longer young, having passed my thirtieth birthday. How time flies! it is shocking! to be thirty years old and no further advanced than I am! Indeed, instead of advancing, I believe that I have fallen back. At twenty I had fifteen thousand francs a year, and now I have but eight. If I go on like this, in a few years more I shall have nothing at all. But have I not acquired some experience, some talent, in return for my money? No experience, I fancy, as I constantly fall into the same errors I used to be guilty of years ago. And talent?--very little, I assure you! because I attempted to acquire all the talents, and could never make up my mind to rely on a single one. I had a vocation for the arts; the result was that I tried them all, and know a little something of each one; which means that I know nothing at all of any value. Painter, sculptor, musician, poet, in turn, I have grazed the surface of them all, but gone to the root of none. Ah! lamentable fickleness of taste, of character! No sooner had I studied a certain thing a little while, than the fatal tendency to change, which is my second nature, caused me to turn my ambition toward some other object. I would say to myself: "I have made a mistake; it is not painting that electrifies me, that sets my soul on fire, but music."--And I would lay aside my brushes, to bang on a piano; and when I had made it shriek for an hour, I would imagine that I was a composer and could safely be employed to write an opera. There is but one sentiment which has never varied, in my case, and that is my love for the ladies; and yet they say that in my relations with them I have retained my fondness for changing. But if one loves flowers, must one pluck only a single one? I love bouquets _à la jardinière_. And, after all, who can say that I would not have been constant if I had found a woman who loved me dearly, and who continued to love me, no matter what happened? This last phrase means many things, which the ladies will readily understand. But I have one very great failing as to them. I will not confide it to you yet; you will discover it soon enough, as you become better acquainted with me. I said a moment ago that my parents--that is to say, my father--left me some property. My mother had had two husbands, and I was the son of her second marriage. As she had nothing when she married my father, it is to him that I am indebted for the fortune which I have employed so ill hitherto.