avenged. You know well my old friend how much and almost how culpably he was beloved by my deceased wife, how extravagantly she admired every idea, impulse and peculiarity of the child, and that Abbé his tutor also, who only excited his imagination and nourished it with legends and miracles; his youthful mind was thus dazzled and rendered incapable of discerning truth and reality, it accustomed him to indulge freely in all the emotions of his heart and to consider them unerring and most exalted. Imperceptibly a contempt for all, who did not coincide with him, crept into his mind, he looked upon them as cold and perverse, and in his zealous hatred, he believed himself infinitely superior to them. I was too weak, too irresolute to remedy the evil while it was yet time, I flattered myself, that it would not take root so easily, and when at last my suffering wife, whose feelings I ever feared to distress, died in giving birth to my youngest child, it was too late."
