If Heaven has not pronounced Its last decree; if there is to be a future, a free and mighty future, that future is still far away, far beyond the visible horizon: we can reach it only with the aid of that Christian hope whose wings grow in proportion as all things seem to betray it, that hope which is longer than time and more powerful than misfortune. Will the work inspired by my ashes and destined for my ashes be extant after me? It is possible that my work may be bad; it is possible that these Memoirs may fade into nothing on seeing the light: at least the things which I have told myself will have served to beguile the tedium of those last hours which no one wishes and which we know not how to employ. At the end of life is a bitter age: nothing pleases, because one is worthy of nothing; useful to none, a burden on all, near to our last resting-place, we have but a step to take to reach it: what would be the good of musing on a deserted shore? What pleasing shadows would one see in the future? Fie upon the clouds that now hover over my head! One idea comes back to me and troubles me: my conscience is not reassured as to the innocence of my vigils; I dread my blindness and man's complacency towards his faults. Is what I am writing really in keeping with justice? Are morality and charity rigorously observed? Have I had the right to speak of others? What would it avail me to repent, if these Memoirs did any harm? O you unknown and hidden of the earth, you whose life, pleasing to the altars, works miracles, all hail to your secret virtues! This or that poor man, destitute of knowledge, about whom none will ever trouble, has, by the mere doctrine of his manners, exercised upon his companions in suffering the divine influence which emanated from the virtues of Christ. The greatest book on earth is not worth so much as an unknown act of those nameless martyrs "whose blood Herod had mingled with their sacrifices[446]." You have seen me born; you have seen my childhood, my idolatry of my singular creation in Combourg Castle, my presentation at Versailles, my attendance, in Paris, at the first spectacle of the Revolution. In the New World, I met Washington; I penetrated into the backwoods; shipwreck brought me back to the coast of my Brittany. Came my sufferings as a soldier, my wretchedness as an Emigrant. Returning to France, I became the author of the _Génie du Christianisme._ In a changed society, I counted and lost friends. Bonaparte stopped me and flung himself, with the blood-stained body of the Duc d'Enghien, across my path; I stopped myself in my turn and brought the great man from his cradle, in Corsica, to his tomb, in St. Helena. I shared in the Restoration and saw its end.