Oh my dear, dear friend, what have you done! you who were the praise of every parent, and the envy of every child! What a mortal blow has virtue itself received through your means, who were the very pattern of discretion! But what can I say to you in so dreadful a situation? Can I think of aggravating your sorrows, and wounding a heart already opprest with grief; or can I give you a comfort, which, alas! I want? Shall I reflect your image in all the dismal colours of your present distress, or shall I have recourse to artifice, and remind you, not of what you are, but of what you ought to be? Do thou, most holy and unspotted friendship, steal thy soft veil over all my awakened senses, and mercifully remove the sight of those disasters, thou wert unable to prevent!
You know I have long feared the misfortune you are bewailing. How often have I foretold it, and alas, how often been disregarded? Do you blame me then for having trusted you too much to your own heart? Oh doubt not but I would have betrayed you, if even that could have been made the means of your preservation; but I knew better than yourself your own tender sensations. I perceived but too plainly that death or ruin were the melancholy alternatives; and even when your apprehensions made you banish your lover, the only matter then in question, was whether you should despair, or he be recalled. You will easily believe how dreadfully I was alarmed, when I found you determined as it were against living, and just on the verge of death. Charge not then your lover, nor accuse yourself of a crime of which I alone am guilty, since I foresaw the fatal effects, and yet did not prevent them.
I left you indeed against my inclination, but I was cruelly forced to it. Oh could I have foreseen the near approach of your destruction, I would have put every thing to the hazard sooner than have complied. Though certain as to the event, I was mistaken as to the time of it. I thought your weakness and your distemper a sufficient security during so short an absence, and forgot indeed the sad dilemma you was so soon to experience. I never considered that the weakness of your body left your mind more defenceless in itself, and therefore more liable to be betrayed. Mistaken as I was, I can scarce be angry with myself, since this very error is the means of saving your life. I am not, Eloisa, of that hardy temper which can reconcile me to thy loss as thou wert to mine. Had I indeed lost you, my despair would have been endless; and, unfeeling as it may seem, I had rather you should live in sorrow, I had almost said in disgrace, than not live at all.
But my dear, my tender friend, why do you cruelly persist in your disquietude? Wherefore should your repentance exceed your very crime, and your contempt fall on the object which least of all deserves it, yourself? Shall the weakness of one unguarded moment be attended with so black a train of baleful consequences? And are not the very dangers you have been struggling with, a self-evident demonstration of the greatness of your virtue? You lose yourself so entirely in the thought of your defeat, that you have no leisure to consider the triumphs by which it was preceded. If your trials have been sharper, your conquests more numerous, and your resistance more frequent, than those who have escaped, have not you then, I would ask, done more for virtue than they? If you can find no circumstances to justify, dwell on those at least, which extenuate and excuse you. I myself am a tolerable proficient in the art of love, and though my own temper secures me against its violent emotions, if ere I could have felt such a passion as yours was, my struggles would have been much fainter, my surrender more easy, and more dishonourable. Freed as I have been from the temptation, it reflects no honour on my virtue. You are the chaster of the two, though perhaps the more unfortunate.
You may perchance be offended that I am so unreserved; but unhappily your situation makes it necessary. I wish from my soul, what I have said were not applicable to you; for I detest pernicious maxims, more than bad actions.[11]If the deed were not already done, and I could have been so base to write, and you to read and hear these axioms, we both of us must be numbered in the wretched class of the abandoned. But as matters stand at present, my duty as your friend requires this at my hands, and you must give me the hearing, or you are lost, lost for ever. For you still possess a thousand rare endowments which a proper esteem of yourself can alone cultivate and preserve. Your real worth will ever exceed your own opinion of it.
Forbear then giving way to a self disesteem more dangerous and destructive than any weakness of which you could be guilty. Does true love debase the soul? No: nor can any crime, which is the result of that love, ever rob you of that enthusiastic ardour for truth and honour, which so raised you above yourself? Are there not spots visible in the sun? How many amiable virtues do you still retain, notwithstanding one error, one relaxation in your conduct? Will it make you less gentle, less sincere, less modest, less benevolent? Or will you be less worthy of all our admiration, of all our praise? Will honour, humanity, friendship, and tender love, be less respected by you, or will you cease to revere even that virtue with which you are no longer adorned. No, my dear, my charming Eloisa, thy faithful Clara bewails and yet adores thee; she is convinced that you can never fail admiring what you may be unable to practise. Believe me, you have much yet to lose, before you can sink to a level with the generality of females.
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.
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