power to beauty; and it is to the advantages I have derived from person
that I owe the ruin of my mind. You have seen how much I now derive from
art I loathe myself as I write that sentence; but no matter: from that
moment you loathed me too. You did not take into consideration, that I
had been living on excitement all my youth, and that in my maturer years
I could not relinquish it. I had reigned by my attractions, and I thought
every art preferable to resigning my empire: but in feeding my vanity, I
had not been able to stifle the dictates of my heart. Love is so natural
to a woman, that she is scarcely a woman who resists it: but in me it has
been a sentiment, not a passion.

"Sentiment, then, and vanity, have been my seducers. I said, that I owed
my errors to circumstances, not to nature. You will say, that in
confessing love and vanity to be my seducers, I contradict this
assertion--you are mistaken. I mean, that though vanity and sentiment
were in me, yet the scenes in which I have been placed, and the events
which I have witnessed, gave to those latent currents of action a wrong
and a dangerous direction. I was formed to love; for one whom I did love
I could have made every sacrifice. I married a man I hated, and I only
learnt the depths of my heart when it was too late.

"Enough of this; you will leave this country; we shall never meet again--
never! You may return to Paris, but I shall then be no more; n'importe--I
shall be unchanged to the last. Je mourrai en reine.

"As a latest pledge of what I have felt for you, I send you the enclosed
chain and ring; as a latest favour, I request you to wear them for six
months, and, above all, for two hours in the Tuileries tomorrow. You will
laugh at this request: it seems idle and romantic--perhaps it is so. Love
has many exaggerations in sentiment, which reason would despise. What