After all, whatever have been your failings, you yourself are still remaining. I want no other comfort, I dread no other loss than you. Your first letter shocked me extremely, and would have thrown me into despair, had I not been kindly relieved, at the same time, by the arrival of your last. What! and could you leave your friend, could you think of going without me? You never mention this, your greatest crime. It is this you should blush at, this too you should repent of. But the ungrateful Eloisa neglects all friendship, and thinks only of her love.
I am extremely impatient till I see you, and am continually repining at the slow progress of time. We are to stay at Lausanne six days longer; I shall then fly to my only friend, and will then either comfort or sympathize, wipe away, or share her sorrows. I flatter myself I shall be able to make you listen, rather to the soothing tenderness of friendship, than the harsh language of reflection. My dear cousin, we must bewail our misfortunes, and pour out our hearts to each other in silence; and, if possibly by dint of future exemplary virtue, bury in oblivion the memory of a failing which can never be blotted out by our tears.
Letter XXXI. To Eloisa.
What an amazing mystery is the conduct and sentiments of the charming Eloisa! Tell me I beseech you, by what surprizing art you alone can unite such inconsistent counteracting emotions? Intoxicated as I am with love and delight, my soul is overwhelmed with grief and with despair. Amidst the most exquisite pleasures, I feel the most excruciating anxieties; nay the very enjoyment of those pleasures is made the subject of self accusation, and the aggravation of my distress. Heavens! what a torment to be able to indulge no one sensation but in a perpetual struggle of jarring passions; to be ever allaying the soothing tenderness of love, with the bitter pangs of rigorous reflection! A state of certain misery were a thousand times preferable to such doubtful disquietudes. To what purpose is it, alas, that I myself have been happy, when your misfortunes can torment me much more sensibly than my own? In vain do you attempt to disguise your own sad feelings, when your eyes will betray what your heart labours to conceal; and can those expressive eyes hide any thing from love’s all penetrating sight? Notwithstanding your assumed gaiety, I see, I see the cankering anxiety; and your melancholy, veiled, as you may think, by a smile, affects me the more sensibly.
Surely you need no longer disguise any thing from me! While I was in your mother’s room yesterday, she was accidentally called out, and left me alone. In the mean time, I heard sighs that pierced my very soul. Could I, think you, be at a loss to guess the fatal cause? I went up to the place from which they seemed to proceed, and on going into your chamber, perceived the goddess of my heart, sitting on the floor, her head reclining on a couch, and almost drowned in tears. Oh! had my blood thus trickled down, I should have felt less pain. Oh how my soul melted at the sight! Remorse stung me to the quick. What had been my supremest bliss, became my excruciating punishment. I felt only then for you, and would have freely purchased with my life, your former tranquility. I would fain have thrown myself at your feet, kissed off your falling tears, and burying them at the bottom of my heart, have died or wiped them away for ever; but your mother’s return made me hasten back to my post, and obliged me to carry away your griefs, and that remorse which can never end but in my death.
Oh how am I sunk and mortified by your grief! How you must despise me if our union is the cause of your own self-contempt, and if what has been the utmost of my bliss, proves the destruction of your peace! Be more just to yourself, my dearest Eloisa, and less prejudiced against the sacred ties which your own heart approved. Have you not acted in strict conformity to the purest laws of nature? Have you not voluntarily entered into the most solemn engagements? Tell me then, what you have done, that all laws divine, as well as human, will not sufficiently justify? Is there any thing wanting to confirm the sacred tie, but the mere formal ceremony of a public declaration? Be wholly mine, and you are no longer to blame. O my dear, my lovely wife, my tender and chaste companion, thou soother of all my cares, and object of all my wishes, oh think it not a crime to have listened to your love; but rather think it will be one to disobey it for the future. To marry any other man, is the only imputation you can fix on your unimpeached honour. Would you be innocent, be ever mine. The tie that unites us is legal, is sacred. The disregarding this tie should be the principal object of your concern. Love from henceforward can be the only guardian of your virtue.
But were the foundation of your sorrows ever so just, ever so necessary, why am I robbed of my property in them? Why should not my eyes too overflow and share your grief? You should have no one pang that I ought not to feel, no one anxiety that ought not to share. My heart then, my jealous heart, but too justly reproaches you for every single tear you pour not into my bosom. Tell me, thou cold dissembling fair, is not every secret of this kind an injury to my passion? Do you so soon forget the promise you so lately made! Oh if you loved as I do, my happiness would comfort you as much as your concern affects me, and you would feel my pleasures as I share your anxieties.
But alas! you consider me as a poor wretch whose reason is lost amidst the transports of delight. You are frightened at the violence of my joy, and compassionate the extravagance of my delirium, without considering that the utmost strength of human nature is not proof against endless pleasures? How, think you, can a poor weak mortal support the ineffable delights of infinite happiness? How do you imagine he can bear such ecstatic raptures without being lost to every other consideration. Do not you know that reason is limited, and that no understanding can command itself at all times, and upon all occasions? Pity then, I beseech you, the distraction you occasion, and forgive the errors you, yourself have thrown me into. I own freely to you I am no longer master of myself. My soul is absorbed totally in yours. However it may affect me in other respects, it fits me at least for the reception of your griefs, and the participation of your sorrows. Oh my dearest Eloisa! no longer conceal any thing from your other self.
Letter XXXII. Answer.
There was a time, my dear friend, when the stile of our letters was as easy to be understood as the subject of them was agreeable and delightful; animated as they were with the warmth of a generous passion, they stood in need of no art to elevate, no colourings of a luxuriant fancy to heighten them. Native simplicity was their best, their only character. That time, alas, is now no more, it is gone beyond the hope of a return; and the first melancholy proof that our hearts are less interested, is, that our correspondence is become less intelligible.
You have been an eye-witness of my concern, and fondly therefore imagine you can discover its true source. You endeavour to relieve me by the mere force of elocution, and while you are thinking to delude me, are yourself the dupe of your own artifice. The sacrifice I have made to my passion is a great one indeed; yet great as it is, it provokes neither my sorrow nor my repentance. But I have deprived this passion of its most engaging circumstances; ah there’s the cause! that virtue which enchanted every thing around it, is itself vanished like a dream. Those inexpressible transports which at once gave both vigour to our affections, and purity to our desires, are now no more. We have made pleasure our sole pursuit, and neglected happiness has bid adieu to us for ever. Call but to mind those Halcyon days, when the fervency of our passion bore a proportion to its innocence, when the violence of our affections gave us weapons against itself; then, the purity of our intentions could reconcile us to restraint, while with comfort we reflected, that even these restraints served to heighten our desires. Compare those charming times with our present situation. Violent emotions, disquieting fears, endless suspicions, perpetual alarms, are the melancholy substitutes of our former gay companions. Where is that zeal for prudence and discretion which inspired every thought, directed every action, and sweetened and refined the delicacy of our love? Is the passion itself altered, or rather are not we most miserably changed? Our enjoyments were formerly both temperate and lasting; they are now degenerated into transports, resembling rather the fury of madness than the caresses of love. A pure and holy flame once lived in our hearts, but now we are sunk into mere common lovers, through a blind gratification of sensual indulgencies. We can now think ourselves sufficiently happy, if jealousy can give a poignancy to those pleasures, which even the very brutes can taste without it.