I can pray for you and for yours without one
thought or wish except for your happiness. Ah! if you only knew
the sublime tranquillity in which I live, now that I have risen in
thought above all petty earthly interests, and how precious is the
thought of DOING (as your noble motto days) our duty, you would
enter your beautiful new life with unfaltering step and never a
glance behind you or about you. Above all, my earnest prayer to
you is that you be faithful to yourself and to those belonging to
you. Dear, society, in which you are to live, cannot exist without
the religion of duty, and you will terribly mistake it, as I
mistook it, if you allow yourself to yield to passion and to
fancy, as I did. Woman is the equal of man only in making her life
a continual offering, as that of man is a perpetual action; my
life has been, on the contrary, one long egotism. If may be that
God placed you, toward evening, by the door of my house, as a
messenger from Himself, bearing my punishment and my pardon.
Heed this confession of a woman to whom fame has been like a
pharos, warning her of the only true path.
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