This was the way in which she deluded me. Her thought everywhere companioned mine. I admired her taste, her curiosity, her culture, and did not realize that it was her love for me which made her take so passionate an interest in everything that I cared for. For she never discovered anything herself. Each one of her admirations--I see it now--was merely a couch on which she could lay her thought alongside of mine; there was nothing in all this that responded to any profound need of her nature. “It was only for you that I adorned and decked myself,” she will say. Yes! But I could have wished that it had been only for _her_ and that she had yielded in doing so to an intimate and personal necessity. But of all these things that she has added to herself for my sake, nothing will remain--not even a regret--not even a sense of something missing. A day comes when the true self, which time has slowly stripped of all its borrowed raiment, reappears, and then, if it was of these ornaments that the other was enamoured, he finds that he is pressing to his heart nothing but an empty dress--nothing but a memory--nothing but grief and despair. Ah! with what virtues, with what perfections I had adorned her! How vexing this question of sincerity is! _Sincerity!_ When I say the word I think only of her. If it is myself that I consider, I cease to understand its meaning. I am never anything but what I think myself--and this varies so incessantly, that often, if I were not there to make them acquainted, my morning’s self would not recognize my evening’s. Nothing could be more different from me than myself. It is only sometimes when I am alone that the substratum emerges and that I attain a certain fundamental continuity; but at such times I feel that my life is slowing down, stopping, and that I am on the very verge of ceasing to exist. My heart beats only out of sympathy; I live only through others--by procuration, so to speak, and by espousals; and I never feel myself living so intensely as when I escape from myself to become no matter who. This anti-egoistical force of decentralization is so great in me, that it disintegrates my sense of property--and, as a consequence, of responsibility. Such a being is not of the kind that one can marry. How can I make Laura understand this? _Oct. 26th._--The only existence that anything (including myself) has for me, is poetical--I restore this word its full signification. It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but that I merely imagine I exist. The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality. I am constantly getting outside myself, and as I watch myself act I cannot understand how a person who acts is the same as the person who is watching him act, and who wonders in astonishment and doubt how he can be actor and watcher at the same moment.