I see that I am contradicting myself. Doubtless, all this is like those forebodings that one assumes one has had because one ought to have had them. The crudest result of what I am obliged to call (if only to conform to common usage) our faults is when they contaminate even the memory of a time when we had not yet committed them. That is precisely what troubles me. For if I should be wrong, I cannot tell in what sense; and I shall never be able to determine if my innocence then was less than I am persuaded it was, or if I am now less guilty than I cause myself to think. But I see I have not managed to explain anything yet.

I need hardly tell you that we were very poor. There is something sad about the financial constraints of old families, where one seems to go on living only out of fidelity. You will ask, fidelity to what? To the house, I suppose, to the ancestors also, and simply to what one was. Oh, poverty does not have much importance for a child; nor had it for my mother and my sisters, since everyone knew us and no one thought us richer than we were. That was the advantage of those closed milieux back then, that one thought less about who you were than about who you had been. The past, however little one thinks about it, is something infinitely more stable than the present, and thus it seems to have a greater importance. No one paid more attention to us than,was necessary. What they esteemed in us was a certain field marshal who had lived so long ago that no one remembered his dates or even the century in which he lived. I am also aware that the fortune of my grandfather and the distinctions achieved by my great-grandfather were things of great importance for us, more real than our own existence. These old-fashioned ways of looking at things will probably make you smile. I realize that other ways, completely opposite, would be no more unreasonable; but these were the ones that helped us live. Just as nothing could prevent us from being the descendants of these figures who had become almost legendary, so nothing could prevent people from continuing to honor them in us; it was, indeed, the only part of our patrimony that was truly inalienable. We were not looked down upon because we had less money or credit than they had had; that was only natural. But to have wished to equal these celebrated men would have been as unseemly as misplaced ambition.