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BookVJI [l.]i.5 After two years of silence and patience, in spite of my resolutions , I am taking up the pen again.6 Reader, suspend your judgment about the reasons that have forced me to do it. You can judge about them after you have read me. 2. My peaceful youth has been seen to flow by in an even life that was sweet enough, without great setbacks or great prosperity. That ordinariness was in large part the work of my ardent but feeble natural character, even less prompt to undertake than it was easy to discourage, leaving repose as a result of jolts, but returning to it out of lassitude and taste, and which, always leading me back—far from great virtues and still farther from great vices—to the idle and tranquil life for which I felt myself born, never allowed me to attain anything great, either for good or for evil. 3. What a different picture I will soon have to develop!7 Fate, which favored my inclinations for thirty years, contradicted them for another thirty, and from this continuous opposition between my situation and my inclinations, one will see born enormous faults, unparalleled misfortunes, and all the virtues, except strength, which can honor adversity.8 4. My first part was written entirely from memory and I must have made many errors in it. Forced to write the second from memory also, I will probably make many more. The sweet remembrances of myfineyears which passed with both tranquillity and innocence,9 left me a thousand charming impressions which I love to recall ceaselessly. It will soon be seen how different are the ones from the remainder of my life. To recall them is to renew their bitterness. Far from sharpening the bitterness of my situation by these sad recollections, I ward them off as much as I can, and often I succeed in doing so to such an extent that I cannot find them again when I need to. This facility of forgetting evils is a consolation which Heaven has arranged for me amidst those which fate was to heap up on me one day. My memory, which retraces only pleasant objects, is the happy counterweight to my frightened imagination, which makes me foresee only cruel futures. 5. Because they have passed into other hands, all the papers I had assembled to supplement my memory and guide me in this undertaking will not return into mine again. I have only one faithful guide upon which I 233 234- Confessions can count; that is the chain of feelings which have marked the succession of my being, and,10 by means of them, the succession of events which have been their cause or effect. I easily forget my misfortunes, but I cannot forget my faults, and I forget my good feelings even less. Their remembrance is too dear to me ever to be effaced from my heart. I can make omissions in the facts, transpositions, errors of dates; but I cannot deceive myself about what I have felt, or about what my feelings have made me do; and that is what is principally at issue. The particular object of my confessions is to make my interior known exactly in all the situations of my life. It is the history of my soul I have promised, and to write it faithfiilly I need no other memories: it is enough for me to return inside myself, as I have done up to this point. 6. Nevertheless, and very fortunately, there is an interval of six or seven years for which I have reliable information in a transcribed collection of letters the originals of which are in the hands of M. du Peyrou.11 This collection, which ends in 1760, covers the whole time of my stay at the Hermitage, and of my big falling out with my self-proclaimed friends: a memorable epoch in my life and one which was the source of all my other misfortunes.With regard to more recent original letters which I have left, and of which there are very few, instead of transcribing them after the collection , which is too voluminous for me to be able to hope to shield from the vigilance of my Arguses,12 1 will transcribe them in this very writing, when they appear to me to furnish some enlightenment,13 either to my advantage or against me: for I do not fear that the reader will ever forget that I...

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