adored. He was not worthy of her idolatry; but she thought that he was.
Admiration for genius exalted sentiment into adoration, and imagination
invested the object of love with qualities superhuman.

Nations do not spontaneously keep alive the memory of those who have
disgraced them. It is their heroes and heroines whose praises they
sing,--those only who have shone in the radiance of genius and virtue.
They forget defects, if these are counterbalanced by grand services or
great deeds,--if their sons and daughters have shed lustre on the land
which gave them birth. But no lustre survives egotism or vice; it only
lasts when it gilds a noble life. There is no glory in the name of
Jezebel, or Cleopatra, or Catherine de' Medici, brilliant and
fascinating as were those queens; but there is glory in the memory of
Héloïse. There is no woman in French history of whom the nation is
prouder; revered, in spite of early follies, by the most austere and
venerated saints of her beclouded age, and hallowed by the tributes of
succeeding centuries for those sentiments which the fires of passion
were scarcely able to tarnish, for an exalted soul which eclipsed the
brightness of uncommon intellectual faculties, for a depth of sympathy
and affection which have become embalmed in the heart of the world, and
for a living piety which blazes all the more conspicuously from the sins
which she expiated by such bitter combats. She was human in her
impulses, but divine in her graces; one of those characters for whom we
cannot help feeling the deepest sympathy and the profoundest
admiration,--a character that has its contradictions, like that
warrior-bard who was after God's own heart, in spite of his crimes,
because his soul thirsted for the beatitudes of heaven, and was bound in
loving loyalty to his Maker, against whom he occasionally sinned by
force of mortal passions, but whom he never ignored or forgot, and
against whom he never persistently rebelled.