would be immoral; it was impossible for me to give the real reason for my refusal, and I could not bring myself to give a false one.  I had recourse to the services of worthy M. Carbon, who undertook to tell my story, and so spared me this painful interview.  I thought it best to go right through with the matter when once it had been begun, and I completed in one day what I had intended to spread over several weeks, so that on the evening of my return I belonged neither to the Seminary nor to the Carmelite house.

I was terrified at seeing so many ties destroyed in a few hours, and I should have been glad to arrest this fatal progress, all too rapid as I thought; but I was perforce driven forward, and there were no means of holding back.  The days which followed were the darkest of my life.  I was isolated from the whole world, without a friend, an adviser or an acquaintance, without any one to appeal to about me, and this after having just left my mother, my native Brittany, and a life gilded with so many pure and simple affections.  Here I am alone in the world, and a stranger to it.  Good-bye for ever to my mother, my little room, my books, my peaceful studies, and my walks by my mother’s side.  Good-bye to the pure and tranquil joys which seemed to bring me so near to God; good-bye to my pleasant past, good-bye to those faiths which so gently cradled me.  Farewell for me to pure happiness.  The past all blotted out, and as yet no future.  And then, I ask myself, will the new world for which I have embarked receive me?  I have left one in which I was loved and made much of.  And my mother, to think of whom was formerly sufficient to solace me in my troubles, was now the cause of my most poignant grief.  I was, as it were, stabbing her with a knife.  O God! was it then necessary that the path of duty should be so stony?  I shall be derided by public opinion, and with all that the future unfolded itself before me pale and colourless.  Ambition was powerless to remove the veil of sadness and regrets which infolded my heart.  I cursed the fate which had enveloped me in such fatal contradictions.  Moreover, the gross and pressing requirements of material existence had to be faced.  I envied the fate of the simple souls who are born, who live and who die without stir or thought, merely following the current as it takes them, worshipping a God whom they call their Father.  How I detested my reason for having bereft me of my dreams.  I passed some time each evening in the church of St. Sulpice, and there I did my best to believe, but it was of no use.  Yes, these days will indeed count in my lifetime, for if they were not the most decisive, they were assuredly the most painful.  It was a hard thing to re-commence life from the beginning, at the age of three and twenty.  I could scarcely realise the possibility of my having to fight my way through the motley crowd of turbulent and ambitious persons.  Timid as I am, I was ever tempted to select a plain and common-place career, which I might have ennobled inwardly.  I had lost the desire to know, to scrutinise and to criticise; it seemed to me as if it was enough to love and to feel; but yet I quite feel that as soon as ever the heart throbbed more slowly, the head would once more cry out for food.