reread.

I opened it, and this is what it contained:

"MY DEAR ARMAND:--I have received your letter. You are still
good, and I thank God for it. Yes, my friend, I am ill, and with
one of those diseases that never relent; but the interest you
still take in me makes my suffering less. I shall not live long
enough, I expect, to have the happiness of pressing the hand
which has written the kind letter I have just received; the words
of it would be enough to cure me, if anything could cure me. I
shall not see you, for I am quite near death, and you are
hundreds of leagues away. My poor friend! your Marguerite of old
times is sadly changed. It is better perhaps for you not to see
her again than to see her as she is. You ask if I forgive you;
oh, with all my heart, friend, for the way you hurt me was only a
way of proving the love you had for me. I have been in bed for a
month, and I think so much of your esteem that I write every day
the journal of my life, from the moment we left each other to the
moment when I shall be able to write no longer. If the interest
you take in me is real, Armand, when you come back go and see
Julie Duprat. She will give you my journal. You will find in it
the reason and the excuse for what has passed between us. Julie
is very good to me; we often talk of you together. She was there
when your letter came, and we both cried over it.

"If you had not sent me any word, I had told her to give you
those papers when you returned to France. Do not thank me for it.
This daily looking back on the only happy moments of my life does
me an immense amount of good, and if you will find in reading it