XXVI + 

Besides that, half of the human race, for whom I have such a lively affection, you will, perhaps, hardly believe me when I tell you that my heart is endowed with such a capacity for tenderness, that all things, animate and inanimate, have a goodly share of it. I love the trees, which afford me shade, and the birds, which warble in the foliage, the nocturnal cry of the screech-owl, and the roar of torrents. I love them all⁠—I even love the moon! You laugh, Mademoiselle, but it is easy to ridicule the feelings one cannot experience, and these hearts which beat with mine will not fail to understand. + 

Yes, I have a veritable love for everything around me. I love the roads I walk on, the fountain at which I drink, and I can scarcely part with a stick I have plucked by chance from a hedge. I look after it still when I have thrown it away, for we had already begun to know one another. I regret the falling leaves, and even the passing breeze. Where now is that breeze which stirred your dark locks, Eliza, when, seated beside me on the banks of the Doire, on the eve of our eternal separation, you gazed at me in sad silence? Where is that glove? Where is that sorrowful but precious moment? Oh, Time! oh, terrible Divinity! Thy cruel scythe hath no terrors for me; but I dread thy hideous children, Indifference and Oblivion, which turn three parts of our existence into a lingering death. + 

Alas! that breeze, that glance, that smile, are now as far away as the adventures of Ariadne. In the depths of my soul there remain nought but regrets and vain remembrances, on which sad medley the bark of my existence still floats, just as a vessel, wrecked by the storm, floats for some time on the troubled waters! + 