tudies, and exhausted his
strength in constant exercises, but all to no purpose. "Oh, do not," he
exclaims, "add to my miseries by your constancy. Forget, if you can,
your favours and that right which they claim over me; allow me to be
indifferent. Why use your eloquence to reproach me for my flight and for
my silence? Spare the recital of our assignations and your constant
exactness to them; without calling up such disturbing thoughts I have
enough to suffer. What great advantages would philosophy give us over
other men if, by studying it, we could learn to govern our passions?
What a troublesome employment is love!"

Then he tries to excuse himself for his original betrayal. "Those
charms, that beauty, that air, which I yet behold at this instant,
occasioned my fall. Your looks were the beginning of my guilt; your
eyes, your discourse, pierced my heart; and, in spite of that ambition
and glory which tried to make a defence, love was soon the master." Even
now "my love burns fiercer amidst the happy indifference of those who
surround me. The Gospel is a language I do not understand when it
opposes my passion. Void of all relish for virtue, without concern for
my condition and without application to my studies, I am continually
present by my imagination where I ought not to be, and I find I have no
power to correct myself." He advises her to give up her mind to her holy
vocation as a means of forgetting him. "Make yourself amends by so
glorious a choice; make your virtue a spectacle worthy of men and
angels. Drink of the chalice of saints, even to the bottom, without
turning your eyes with uncertainty upon me. To forget Heloise, to see
her no more, is what Heaven demands of Abelard; and to expect nothing
from Abelard, to forget him even as an idea, is what Heaven enjoins on
Heloise."

He acknowledges that he made her take the veil for his own selfish
reasons, but is now bound to admit that "God rejected my offering and my
prayer, and continued my punishment by suffering me to continue my love.
Thus I bear alike the guilt of your vows and of the passion that
preceded them, and must be tormented all the days of my life." Once more
he adjures her to deliver herself from the "shameful remains" of a
passion which has taken too deep root. "To love Heloise truly," he
closes, "is to leave her to that quiet which retirement and virtue
afford. I have resolved it: this letter shall be my last fault. Adieu! I
hope you will be wil