I had reigned by my attractions, and I thought every art preferable to resigning my empire: but in feeding my vanity, I had not been able to stifle the dictates of my heart.

Love is so natural to a woman, that she is scarcely a woman who resists it: but in me it has been a sentiment, not a passion.
"Sentiment, then, and vanity, have been my seducers.

I said, that I owed my errors to circumstances, not to nature.

You will say, that in confessing love and vanity to be my seducers, I contradict this assertion--you are mistaken.

I mean, that though vanity and sentiment were in me, yet the scenes in which I have been placed, and the events which I have witnessed, gave to those latent currents of action a wrong and a dangerous direction.