beginning with
that love which was more happy than lasting, so that, by comparing that
happiness with my present case, you may learn that I am now more unhappy
than any woman ever has been. And afterward I will trace with mournful
pen, as best I can, all the agonies which are justly the source of my
lamentations. But first, if the prayers of the wretched are heard, if
there is in Heaven any Deity whose holy mind can be touched with
compassion for me, afflicted as I am, bathed in my own tears, Him I
beseech to aid my despondent memory and support my trembling hand in its
present task. So may the tortures which I have felt and still feel in my
soul become fruitful, and the memory will suggest the words for them,
and the hand, more eager than apt for such duty, will write them down.

Chapter I

_Wherein the lady describes who she was, and by what signs her
misfortunes were foreshadowed, and at what time, and where, and in what
manner, and of whom she became enamored, with the description of the
ensuing delight._

In the time when the newly-vestured earth appears more lovely than
during all the rest of the year came I into the world, begotten of noble
parents and born amid the unstinted gifts of benignant fortune. Accursed
be the day, to me more hateful than any other, on which I was born! Oh,
how far more befitting would it have been had I never been born, or had
I been carried from that luckless womb to my grave, or had I possessed a
life not longer than that of the teeth sown by Cadmus, or had Atropos
cut the thread of my existence at the very hour when it had begun! Then,
in earliest childhood would have been entombed the limitless woes that
are the melancholy occasion of that which I am writing. But what boots
it to complain of this now? I am here, beyond doubt; and it has pleased
and even now pleases God that I should be here. Born and reared, then,
amid boundless affluence, I learned under a venerable mistress whatever
manners and refinements it beseems a demoiselle of high rank to know.
And as my person grew and developed with my increasing years, so also
grew and developed my beauty. Alas! even while a child, on hearing that
beauty acclaimed of many, I gloried therein, and cultivated it by
ingenious care and art. And when I had bidden farewell to childhood, and
had attained a riper age, I soon discovered that this, my beauty
--ill-fated gift for one who desires to live virtuously!--had power to
kindle am