responsibility is certainly very great. What will be the extent of mine!
Ah, dear father! believe nothing of what you hear about me; believe
only what I shall tell you. If they tell you that I have committed a
deliberate piece of villany, answer that it is a lie. It is difficult,
very difficult, for me to judge myself, in the state of disquietude in
which I am, but I dare assure you that I have not deliberately given
cause for scandal. You know well to what extremes passion can lead when
circumstances favor its fierce, its all-invading growth.

"What is most bitter to me is the thought of having employed artifice,
deceit, and base concealments--I who was truth itself. I am humiliated
in my own estimation. But is this the greatest perversity into which the
soul can fall? Am I beginning now, or have I ended? I cannot tell. If
Rosario with her angelic hand does not take me out of this hell of
my conscience, I desire that you should come to take me out of it. My
cousin is an angel, and suffering, as she has done, for my sake, she has
taught me a great many things that I did not know before.

"Do not be surprised at the incoherence of what I write. Diverse
emotions inflame me; thoughts at times assail me truly worthy of my
immortal soul; but at times also I fall into a lamentable state of
dejection, and I am reminded of the weak and degenerate characters whose
baseness you have painted to me in such strong colors, in order that I
might abhor them. In the state in which I am to-day I am ready for good
or for evil. God have pity upon me! I already know what prayer is--a
solemn and reflexive supplication, so personal that it is not compatible
with formulas learned by heart; an expansion of the soul which dares to
reach out toward its source; the opposite of remorse, in which the
soul, at war with itself, seeks in vain to defend itself by sophisms
and concealments. You have taught me many good things, but now I am