" I
then told her, without concealment, as I would have spoken before
Heaven, of all that could interest her in my life. I related my birth,
my humble and poor condition; I spoke of my father, a soldier of former
days; my mother, a woman of exquisite sensibility, whose youth had been
passed in all the refinement and elegance of letters; my young sisters,
their pious and angelic simplicity; I mentioned my education among the
children of my native mountains; my ready enthusiasm for study; my
involuntary inaction; my travels; my first thrill of the heart beside
the youthful daughter of the Neapolitan fisherman; the unprofitable
acquaintances I formed in Paris,--the levity, misconduct, and
self-abasement which had been the result; my desire for a soldier's
life, which peace had counteracted at the very time I entered the army;
my leaving my regiment; my wanderings without an object; my hopeless
return to the paternal roof; my wasting melancholy; my wish to die; my
weariness of everything; and lastly, I spoke of my physical languor, A
proceeding from heaviness of the soul, and of that premature
decrepitude of the heart, and distaste of life, which was concealed
beneath the appearance and features of a man of four-and-twenty.
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