did not run to behold you? Wives and maidens alike recognized your
beauty and grace. Queens envied Héloïse her Abélard.

Two gifts you had to lead captive the proudest soul, your voice that
made all your teaching a delight, and your singing, which was like no
other. Do you forget those tender songs you wrote for me, which all the
world caught up and sang,--but not like you,--those songs that kept your
name ever floating in the air, and made me known through many lands, the
envy and the scorn of women?

What gifts of mind, what gifts of person glorified you! Oh, my loss! Who
would change places with me now!

And _you_ know, Abelard, that though I am the great cause of your
misfortunes, I am most innocent. For a consequence is no part of a
crime. Justice weighs not the thing done, but the intention. And how
pure was my intention toward you, you alone can judge. Judge me! I
will submit.

But how happens it, tell me, that since my profession of the life which
you alone determined, I have been so neglected and so forgotten that you
will neither see me nor write to me? Make me understand it, if you can,
or I must tell you what everybody says: that it was not a pure love like
mine that held your heart, and that your coarser feeling vanished with
absence and ill-report. Would that to me alone this seemed so, best
beloved, and not to all the world! Would that I could hear others excuse
you, or devise excuses myself!

The things I ask ought to seem very small and easy to you. While I
starve for you, do, now and then, by words, bring back your presence to