No one can state without lying that I have told what most people tell in a moment of pain, pleasure, or vanity. A name, a confession of any seriousness never issues, or issues but rarely, from my lips. I never talk to casual people of my interests, my plans, my work, my ideas, my attachments, my joys, my sorrows, being persuaded of the profound weariness which one causes to others by talking of one's self. Sincere and truthful though I be, I am lacking in openness of heart: my soul incessantly tends to close up; I do not tell anything wholly, and I have never allowed my complete life to transpire, except in these Memoirs. If I try to begin a story, I am suddenly terrified at the idea of its length; after four words, the sound of my voice becomes unendurable to me, and I am silent. As I believe in nothing except religion, I distrust everything: malevolence and disparagement are the two distinctive qualities of the French mind; derision and calumny, the certain result of a confidence. But what have I gained by my reserved nature? To become, because I was impenetrable, a fantastic something, having no relation with my real being? My very friends are mistaken in me, when they think that they are making me better known and when they adorn me with the illusions of their love for me. All the small intellects of the ante-chambers, the public offices, the newspapers, the cafés have assigned ambition to me, whereas I have none at all. Cold and dry in matters of everyday life, I have nothing of the enthusiast or the sentimentalist: my clear and swift perception quickly pierces men and facts, and strips them of all importance. Far from carrying me away, from idealizing apposite truths, my imagination disparages the loftiest events and baffles even myself; I see the petty and ridiculous side of things first of all; great geniuses and great things scarcely exist in my eyes. While I show myself polite, encomiastic and full of admiration for the self-conceited minds which proclaim themselves superior intelligences, my secret contempt laughs at all those faces intoxicated with incense, and covers them with Callot[195] masks. In politics, the warmth of my opinions has never exceeded the length of my speech or my pamphlet. In the inner and theoretical life, I am the man of all the dreams; in the outer and practical life, I am the man of realities. Adventurous and orderly, passionate and methodical, I am the most chimerical and the most positive, the most ardent and the most icy being that ever existed, a whimsical androgynus, formed out of the different blood of my mother and my father.