Excerpt from Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, Vol. 1 of 2: From the German The pen trembles in my hand, for my heart - this old, storm-beaten, tired heart- still must tremble at the thought, that when the eyes of strangers read these lines it - this heart - will have ceased to beat - this hand will rest stiff and cold under the earth! Dust-ashes of my life! This poor human heart, which once bloomed and laughed so full of youthful gaiety, like a flower of spring in the first sunshine, which the young heart bright with joy took for an everlasting one - and which since then has erred and failed so much, suffered and wept! And of this heart and its demons and its old, long-forgotten, long-dead stories I will speak here - but must likewise speak of other hearts and their demons and their old scattered and forgotten stories, as life brought them under my notice - out of which I first learned to know life, when I myself was still an innocent, stupid child. Of course only much later, when I had myself already tasted from the tree of knowledge and forfeited paradise, all became so frightfully clear to me, as I here relate it; but the terrified looks which the ignorant little girl even then cast into the depths and shallows of the heart, continued their effect during the whole of my after-life, enlightening and consuming. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.