call me your master; it is true you were entrusted to my care. I saw
you, I was earnest to teach you; it cost you your innocence and me my
liberty. If now, having lost the power of satisfying my passion, I had
also lost that of loving you, I should have some consolation. But I find
myself much more guilty in my thoughts of you, even amidst my tears,
than in possessing you when I was in full liberty. I continually think
of you; I continually call to mind your tenderness."

He explains some of the means he has tried to make himself forget. He
has tried several fasts, and redoubled studies, 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