_Sursum corda!_ PARIS, _April 25, 185-_. The second evening I have passed in this miserable room, staring gloomily at the bare hearth, hearing the dull monotone of the street, and feeling more lonely, more forsaken, and nearer to despair in the heart of this great city than a ship-wrecked man shivering on a broken plank in mid-ocean. I have done with cowardice. I will look my destiny in the face till it loses its spectral air. I will open my sorrowful heart to the one confidant whose pity will not hurt, to that pale last friend who looks back at me from the glass. I will write down my thoughts and my life, not in trivial and childish detail, but without serious omissions, and above all without lies. I shall love my journal; it will be a brotherly echo to cheat my loneliness, and at the same time a second conscience warning me not to allow anything to enter into my life which I dare not write down calmly with my own hand. Now, with sad eagerness I search the past for the facts and incidents which should have long since enlightened me, had not filial respect, habit, and the indifference of a happy idler blinded me. I understand now my mother’s deep and constant melancholy; I understand her distaste for society, and why she wore that plain, unvaried dress which sometimes called forth sarcasms, sometimes wrath from my father.—"You look like a servant," he would say to her. I could not but be conscious that our family life was broken by more serious quarrels, though I was never an actual witness of them. All I heard were my father’s sharp and imperious tones, the murmur of a pleading voice, and stifled sobs. These outbursts I attributed to my father’s violent and fruitless attempts to revive in my mother the taste for the elegant and brilliant life which she had once enjoyed as much as becomes a virtuous woman, but into which she now accompanied my father with a repugnance that grew stronger every day. After such crises, my father nearly always ran off to buy some costly trinket which my mother found in her table-napkin at dinner, and never wore. One day in the middle of winter she received a large box of rare flowers from Paris; she thanked my father warmly, but directly he had left the room, I saw her slightly raise her shoulders and look up to heaven with an expression of hopeless despair.