The fathers of this blooming pair,
Our lovers and our friends.
I was the unfortunate fruit of this return, being born ten months
after, in a very weakly and infirm state; my birth cost my mother
her life, and was the first of my misfortunes. I am ignorant how my
father supported her loss at that time, but I know he was ever after
inconsolable. In me he still thought he saw her he so tenderly
lamented, but could never forget that I had been the innocent cause of
his misfortune, nor did he over embrace me, but his sighs, the
convulsive pressure of his arms, witnessed that a bitter regret
mingled itself with his caresses, though, as may be supposed, they
were not on this account less ardent. When he said to me, "Jean
Jacques, let us talk of your mother," my usual reply was, "Yes,
father, but then, you know, we shall cry," and immediately the tears
started from his eyes. "Ah!" exclaimed he, with agitation, "Give me
back my wife; at least console me for her loss; fill up, dear boy, the
void she has left in my soul. Could I love thee thus wert thou only my
son?" Forty years after this loss he expired in the arms of a second
wife, but the name of the first still vibrated on his lips, still
was her image engraved on his heart.
Such were the authors of my being: of all the gifts it had pleased
Heaven to bestow on them, a feeling heart was the only one that
descended to me; this had been the source of their felicity, it was
the foundation of all my misfortunes.
I came into the world with so few signs of life, that they
entertained but little hope of preserving me, with the seeds of a
disorder that has gathered strength with years, and from which I am
now relieved at intervals, only to suffer a different, though more
intolerable evil. I owed my preservation to one of my father's
sisters, an amiable and virtuous girl, who took the most tender care
of me; she is yet living, nursing, at the age of fourscore, a
husband younger than herself, but worn out with excessive drinking.
Dear aunt! I freely forgive your having preserved my life, and only
lament that it is not in my power to bestow on the decline of your
days the tender solicitude and care you lavished on the first dawn
of mine. My nurse, Jaqueline, is likewise living, and in good
health- the hands that opened my eyes to the light of this world may
close them at my death. We suffer before we think; it is the common
lot of humanity. I experienced more than my proportion of it. I have
no knowledge of what passed prior to my fifth or sixth year; I
recollect nothing of learning to read, I only remember what effect the
first considerable exercise of it produced on my mind; and from that
moment I date an uninterrupted knowledge of myself.
Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection
of romances which had been my mother's. My father's design was only to
improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were
calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves
so interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately
read whole nights together, and could not bear to give over until at
