These expressions, scarcely equalled by the delirium of Sappho, succeed at length in rekindling the expiring passion of Abelard. He replies by quotations from Virgil, from Lucanus, and by passages from the Song of Solomon. To convince her that their sorrows are not unmerited, he reminds her on his side of their past pleasures, and among others, of a sacrilegious interview held in the refectory of the convent of Argenteuil, where he had visited her in secret. He then, and more than once, enlarges in praise of eunuchs, and ends by enclosing a prayer he has composed for her and for himself. This closes the amorous correspondence, for in the next letter Eloisa declares her resolution, to which she remains firm, of putting a restraint on the ardour of her feelings, although she cannot at the same time refrain from quoting some equivocal lines from Ovid’s _Art of Love_. We must here once more ask whether, circumstanced as these two lovers were, and taking into consideration the piety and resignation apparent in all the writings of Abelard, he being at the time fifty-four years of age, and Eloisa thirty-three--and after fourteen years’ separation, it is credible or possible that the letters we have quoted, letters in which all modesty is laid aside, should have been written by Eloisa? Allowing that she had preserved Abelard’s correspondence, is it easy to suppose that Abelard, continually moving from place to place, should have preserved hers to the day of his death, so that their letters might eventually be brought together?--letters, too, breathing an ardour so compromising to the reputation of both? Is it likely that Eloisa should have kept copies of her own letters, the perusal of which, it must be confessed would not have tended to the edification of the nuns? Remember also that all these events occurred in the first half of the 12th century, in an age when it was very unusual to make collections of any correspondence of an amorous nature. We can then only arrive at the same conclusion as Messieurs Lalanne, Orelli, Ch. Barthélemy, and others, viz. that the correspondence which has given such renown to the names of Abelard and Eloisa as lovers, is in all probability apocryphal. M. Ludovic Lalanne has another supposition, which is curious, and which appears to us not to be impossible: