"My only pleasure is to snatch a few hours wherein to busy myself with a work which alone can bring some assuagement to my grief: it is the Memoirs of my Life. Rome will have a place in it; it is in this way only that I can henceforth speak of Rome. Have no fear; there will be no confessions likely to give pain to my friends: if I am to count for anything in the future, my friends' names will therein appear glorified and respected. Nor shall I entertain posterity with the details of my frailties; I shall say of myself only what becomes my dignity as a man, and, I dare say it, the elevation of my heart. One should show to the world only what is beautiful; it is no lie against God to unveil of one's life no more than may lead our fellows towards noble and generous feelings. Not that, in truth, I have anything to conceal: I have not caused the dismissal of a servant-girl for a stolen ribbon, nor left my friend to die in the street, nor dishonoured the woman who sheltered me, nor taken my bastards to the Foundling Hospital[578]; but I have had my moments of weakness, of faint-heartedness: one sigh over myself will be sufficient to make others understand those common miseries, meant to be left behind the veil. What would society gain by the reproduction of sores that occur on every side? There is no lack of examples, where it is a question of triumphing over our poor human nature." * [Sidenote: I decide to write my memoirs.] In this plan which I made for myself I omitted my family, my childhood, my youth, my travels, and my exile: yet these are the recitals in which I took most pleasure. I had been like a happy slave: accustomed to apply his liberty to the vine-stocks, he no longer knows what to do with his leisure when his chains are broken. Whenever I decided to set to work, a figure came and placed itself before me, and I could not take my eyes from it: religion alone held me by its gravity and by the reflections of a higher order which it suggested to me. And yet, while occupied with the thought of writing my Memoirs, I felt the price which the ancients attached to the value of their name: there is perhaps a touching reality in this perpetuity of the memories which one may leave on the way. Perhaps, among the great men of antiquity, this idea of an immortal life among the human race supplied the place of the immortality of the soul which for them remained a problem. If fame is but a small thing when it relates to ourselves, it must nevertheless be agreed that to give an imperishable existence to all that it has loved is one of the finest privileges attached to the friendship of genius.