XXXVI
The splendid vision I had just enjoyed made me feel all the more acutely on awaking, all the horror of my isolated situation. I looked all round and saw nothing but the roofs and the chimneys. Alas! suspended on the fifth story, between heaven and earth, surrounded by a sea of troubles, aspirations, and anxieties, I was attached to life solely by a faint glimmer of hope, a treacherous support, whose fragility I had often experienced. Doubt soon returned to my desolate heart, in which the wounds caused by the troubles of life were still far from healed, and I quite believed that the pole star had been mocking me. Unjust and wicked suspicion! for which she has punished me with ten years of waiting. Oh! if I could then have foreseen that all these promises would be fulfilled, and that one day I should find on earth the adorable being whose image I had seen in the heavens.
Dear Sophie, if I had known that my good fortunes would even surpass all my hopes! But I must not anticipate events. I return to my subject, unwilling to depart from the severe and methodical order to which I have bound myself in the compilation of my travels.