I next answered by letter the advertisement of a distinguished savant who was about to undertake the translation of the Sacred Vedas, and was in want of an amanuensis.  To this I received the following reply: 

’MADEMOISELLE:  If your attainments in Sanscrit are such as you represent them, I am convinced that you would exactly suit me, were you a young man.  But I am a bachelor; there is not a single female in my establishment; your sex, therefore, renders it impossible for me to employ you as my amanuensis.’

My sex again!  Discouraged, but not daunted, I applied successively to the Societe Asiatique, to the librarian of the Institute, and to three or four private individuals of more or less note.  From all of them I received the same answer—­the situation was not open to women.

Meantime the few francs I had had at my father’s death vanished, one by one.  The woman from whom I hired my room became clamorous for the rent.  I had a few superfluous articles of clothing.  I disposed of them at the Mont-de-Piete, and thus kept the wolf from the door a little longer.  When they were all gone, what should I do?

I persevered in my quest for employment.  It was all in vain.  Many people added insults to their harsh refusal of my application, accusing me of being an impostor; for who ever heard, said they, of a young girl like me being acquainted with these abstruse studies!  Day after day, week after week, I plodded on through the mire and dirt, for it was winter, the weeping winter of Paris, and the obscure and narrow streets (traversed by a filthy kennel in the center, and destitute of sidewalks) through which my researches led me, were in a dreadful condition.  And evermore the question recurred to me, What shall I do?

As day after day passed, and still no opening appeared, I thought of the river, rolling darkly through the heart of the city, in whose silent tide so many a poor unfortunate has sought a refuge from present misery.  One day, as in the course of my peregrinations I passed the Morgue, I saw the dead body of a young woman which had been taken that morning from the river, and laid out for recognition by her friends.  As I looked on her livid, bloated face, her drenched and tattered garments, her long dark hair hanging in dank matted masses, and streaming over the edge of the table on which she lay, my heart was moved with pity.  Yet I half envied her position, and might have followed her example, but for my belief in a future state.  Her body was free from every mortal ill, but her poor soul, where was it?

But besides, looking at it from a merely human point of view, there is in my nature a certain stern and rugged resolution, a sort of ‘never-give-up’ feeling, which induces me to hope and struggle on, and leads me to think, with the great Napoleon, that suicide is the act of a coward, since it is an attempt to fly from those evils which God has laid upon us, rather than to bear them with a brave, enduring trust in Providence.