Refrain, my lord, I beg, from making the miserable most miserable with such words; destroy not our life before we die. 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and that day will come to all with bitterness enough. 'What need,' says Seneca, 'to add to evil, and destroy life before death?'
"Thou askest, only one, that, in the event of thy death when absent from us, we should have thy body brought to our cemetery, in order that, being always in our memory, thou shouldst obtain greater benefit from our prayers. Did you think that your memory could slip from us? How could we pray, with distracted minds? What use of tongue or reason would be left to us? When the mind is crazed against God it will not placate Him with prayer so much as irritate Him with complaints. We could only weep, pressing to follow rather than bury you. How could we live after we had lost our life in you? The thought of your death is death to us; what would be the actuality? God grant we shall not have to pay those rites to one from whom we look for them; may we go before and not follow! A heart crushed with grief is not calm, nor is a mind tossed by troubles open to God. Do not, I beg, hinder the divine service to which we are dedicated.
"What remains of hope for me when thou art gone? Or what reason to continue in this pilgrimage, where I have no solace save thee? and of thee I have but the bare knowledge that thou dost live, since thy restoring presence is not granted me. Oh!—if it is right to say it how cruel has God been to me! Inclement Clemency! Fortune has emptied her quiver against me, so that others have nothing to fear! If indeed a single dart were left, no place could be found in me for a new wound. Fortune fears only lest I escape her tortures by death. Wretched and unhappy! in thee I was lifted above all women; in thee am I the more fatally thrown down. What glory did I have in thee! what ruin have I now! Fortune made me the happiest of women that she might make me the most miserable. The injury was the more outrageous in that all ways of right were broken. While we were abandoned to love's delights, the divine severity spared us. When we made the forbidden lawful and by marriage wiped out fornication's stains, the Lord's wrath broke on us, impatient of an unsullied bed when it long had borne with one defiled. A man taken in adultery would have been amply punished by what came to you. What others deserved for adultery, that you got from the marriage which you thought had made amends for everything. Adulteresses bring their paramours what your own wife brought you. Not when we lived for pleasure, but when, separated, we lived in chastity, you presiding at the Paris schools, I at thy command dwelling with the nuns at Argenteuil; you devoted to study, I to prayer and holy reading; it was then that you alone
paid the penalty for what we had done together. Alone you bore