If it will give you pleasure I will do it.--Ah! if you could have been mine, how different my life might have been from what it has been!--The world has a very false idea of me, and I should have lived and died without any one suspecting what I am--except you, Théodore, the only one who has understood me and been cruel to me.--I have never wanted any one but you for a lover, and I have never had you. O Théodore, if you had loved me, I should have been virtuous and chaste, I should have been worthy of you; instead of that, I shall leave behind me--if any one remembers me--the reputation of a dissolute woman, a sort of courtesan, who differed from her of the gutter only in rank and fortune.--I was born with the highest aspirations; but nothing depraves one so much as being unloved.--Many people despise me who have no idea what I have had to suffer before reaching my present position.--Being sure that I shall never belong to the man I would prefer above all others, I have allowed myself to float with the current, I have not taken the trouble to defend a body that could not be yours.--As for my heart, no one has had it and no one ever will. It is yours, although you have broken it;--and I am different from the majority of women who believe themselves virtuous provided they have not passed from one bed to another, in this respect--although I have prostituted my flesh, I have been faithful in heart and soul to the thought of you.--At all events I shall have made some few people happy, I shall have caused white-robed illusions to dance about some pillows. I have innocently deceived more than one noble heart. I have been so miserable at being spurned by you, that I have always been horrified at the thought of compelling any one else to undergo such torture. That is the sole worthy motive of adventures which are commonly attributed to a spirit of libertinage pure and simple!--I, a libertine! O society!--If you knew, Théodore, how intensely painful it is to feel that your life is a failure, that you have let slip your chance of happiness, to see that everybody misunderstands you and that it is impossible to make people change their opinion of you, that your most estimable qualities are tortured into defects, your purest essences into deadly poisons, that nothing except the evil in you has transpired; to have found doors always open to your vices and always closed to your virtues, and to have been unable to bring to perfection, amid such a wilderness of hemlock and aconite, a single lily or a single rose! you know nothing of that, Théodore. THÉODORE.