In the midst of our solitude, each day brings a new joy that makes you dearer to my heart.
Thus the pearls of the sea owe their imperishable lustre to the shadows of each succeeding wave.
You often tell me, Marie, that my nature is noble, generous, and, above all, good.
When you will have read this journal of my whole life, Marie, my beautiful and gentle Marie, you will find out that I have often been hard-hearted and wicked.
That goodness for which you praise me, it is to you that I owe it!
Under your holy influence, my beautiful guardian angel, all my bad instincts have disappeared, all my highest sentiments have been exalted; in a word I have loved you, I love you now as you deserve to be loved.
To love you thus, and to be loved by you, Marie, is to believe oneself the first and noblest of men, to despise glory, ambition, fortune, to feel above them all.
It is to have gone beyond the limits of all possible happiness.
This superhuman happiness would alarm me, had we not purchased it by your sorrow and remorse, poor Marie!
This remorse has been, and still is, your only grief; the time has come to deliver you from it.