Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/31

19 the punishment, which you deserved less than I. When you had humiliated yourself and elevated me and all my kin, you little merited that punishment either from God or from those traitors. Miserable me, begotten to cause such a crime! O womankind ever the ruin of the noblest men!

"Well the Tempter knows how easy is man's overthrow through a wife. He cast his malice over us, and the man whom he could not throw down through fornication, he tried with marriage, using a good to bring about an evil where evil means had failed. I thank God at least for this, that the Tempter did not draw me to assent to that which became the cause of the evil deed. Yet, although in this my mind absolves me, too many sins had gone before to leave me guiltless of that crime. For long a servant of forbidden joys, I earned the punishment which I now suffer of past sins. Let the evil end be attributed to ill beginnings! May my penitence be meet for what I have done, and may long remorse in some way compensate for the penalty you suffered! What once you suffered in the body, may I through contrition bear to the end of life, that so I may make satisfaction to thee if not to God. To confess the infirmities of my most wretched soul, I can find no penitence to offer God, whom I never cease to accuse of utter cruelty towards you. Rebellious to His rule, I offend Him with indignation more than I placate Him with penitence. For that cannot be called the sinner's penitence where, whatever be the body's suffering, the mind retains the will to sin and still burns with the same desires. It is easy in confession to accuse oneself of sins, and also to do penance with the body; but hard indeed to turn the heart from the desire of its greatest joys! Love's pleasures, which we knew together, cannot be made displeasing to me nor driven from my memory. Wherever I turn, they press upon me, nor do they spare my dreams. Even in the solemn moments of the Mass, when prayer should be the purest, their phantoms catch my soul. When I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost. Not only our acts, but times and places stick fast in my mind, and my body quivers. O truly wretched me, fit only to utter this cry of the soul: 'Wretched that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' Would I could add with truth what follows:—'I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' Such thanksgiving, dearest, may be thine, by one bodily ill cured of many tortures of the soul, and God may have been merciful where He seemed against you; like a good physician who does not spare the pain needed to save life. But I am tortured with passion and the fires of memory. They call me chaste, who do not know me for a