"Father, is it really true that God forgives every great sin?"
"This is the greatest sin of which you might perchance accuse yourself. Have you truly examined your own conscience? Are you disposed not to hide any of your acts, words, deeds, omissions, thoughts, in short everything? Remember that St. Augustine teaches, that confession is the open demonstration of our internal infirmity with the hope of obtaining a cure; and although this is a great deal, yet it is not enough, and a contrite and repentant heart is also required: have you brought with you this repentant heart? If so, as I hope, speak; man may first be weary with sinning, before Divine mercy with forgiving."
"Amen, Father, amen! I will speak confiding in pardon, not because I deserve it, but because, as you say, Divine mercy is great. I have been a sinful daughter, mother, wife, citizen, all in short...."
"Well!"
"As a citizen, I have done no good: many I have injured, and if even I did good to any one, I feel that I was moved less by charity than by a vain pomp of appearing generous. I hid not from my left hand the alms done by my right; I was pleased that the world should know it, and people should talk of it."
"This is not a merit, but not a sin. You have bought worldly fame: these alms you will not find registered in the books of heaven. Recipisti mercedem tuam, you have received your reward. It is the charity of the Pharisee; and it is generally what the present world give. Men now give a penny with a sound of trumpets, they notify it with ringing of bells, and large printed notices on all the corners of the street ... Vanitas vanitatum ... it is all a vanity! Hence you may consider that you have already received your reward for the charities done."
"As a daughter I paid but little attention to the advices and admonitions of my father.—I cannot live for ever!—he would often say to me: but happy he, and myself also, if he had given me less advice, and, may God have mercy on his soul, a better example!"
"Wife!—Nature gave me a fatal gift: a most ardent imagination, restless desires, a wonderful disposition to learn, and a retentive memory. I learned, and exercised with passion all that which is capable of exalting the mind and ennobling the heart. Educated among luxuries, fêted, and constantly flattered with sweet words; surrounded by pleasures, and manners loosened to all sorts of dissipations; given as wife to a man whom I did not know, nor who knew me; we fancied each other but little, and loved less; he a soldier, I a worshipper of the muses. One day, oppressed by insupportable ennui, my husband went off; he was to remain away three months, and he stayed three years. I dared to presume too much to myself, and pride overcame me. Then I fancied a destiny, which only my mind conceived, an invincible passion nourished only by my own fancy, and creating, and I may almost say lending to a man worthless in himself, the qualities of perfection, which I dreamed in the ideals of my poetry ... I dug with my own hands the abyss wherein I fell ... and I was lost. When I awoke from that dream, I saw my house full of shame, and before me a most degraded man, and myself more degraded than he. The harvest of guilt was fully reaped by me;—bitter tears, ineffable grief, contempt for myself, repentance, late indeed, but great, deep, and such a one that God may have seen equalled, but never greater."
"And was the time long that you lived in sin?" inquired the confessor, with a harsh, slow voice.