Remember this, you cannot impress others unless you firmly believe yourself.

The greatest impostors of all ages have ever been their own dupes." At the word impostor, Paul seemed about to speak, but a wave of Tantaine's hand silenced him.
"You must cast aside your old skin, and enter that of another.

Paul Violaine, the natural son of a woman who kept a small drapery shop at Poitiers, Paul Violaine, the youthful lover of Rose, no longer exists.
He died of cold and hunger in a garret in the Hotel de Perou, as M.de Loupins will testify when necessary." The tone in which Tantaine spoke showed his intense earnestness, and with emphatic gestures he drove each successive idea into Paul's brain.
"You will rid yourself of your former recollections as you do of an old coat, which you throw aside, and forget the very existence of.

And not only that, but you must lose your memory, and that so entirely, that if any one in the street calls out Violaine, you will never even dream of turning round." Paul's brain seemed to tremble beneath the crime that his companion was teaching him.
"Who am I then ?" asked he.
A sardonic smile crossed Tantaine's face.
"You are just what the portress told you, Paul, and nothing more.

Your first recollections are of a Foundling Hospital, and you never knew your parents.