The charge must also be laid, though with less insistence, against the parallels which some writers have discovered, or invented, for Heloise. The most famous are the _Portuguese Letters_, a series of singularly ardent love-letters from a Portuguese nun to a French noble. The correspondents are said to have been Marianne Alcoforado and M. de Chamilly—to look at whom, said St. Simon, you would never have thought him the soul of the _Portuguese Letters_. He was neither talented nor handsome, and his liaison with the nun seems to have been no more than the usual temporary incident in a soldier’s life. When he returned to France she wrote the letters which are so frequently associated with those of Heloise. It is an unworthy and a superficial comparison. There is a ground for comparison in the condition of the writer and in the free and vivid expression of a consuming love, but they are separated by profound differences. The Portuguese nun has nothing but her love; her life is being consumed in one flame of passion. Heloise is never so wholly lost in her passion; she can regard it objectively. Even were Abélard other than he was at the time, no one who knows Heloise could conceive her, after her vows, to say, ‘if it were possible for me to get out of this miserable cloister, I should not wait in Portugal for the fulfilment of your promise,’ or imagine her, under any conditions, to talk lightheartedly to her lover of ‘the languid pleasures your French mistresses give you,’ and remind him that he only sought in her ‘un plaisir grossier.’ There is not a word, in any of the _Portuguese Letters_, of God, of religious vows, of any thought or feeling above the plane of sense, of any appreciation of the literal sacrilege of her position, of anything but a wilful abandonment to a violent passion. There are the same defects, though they are less obtrusive, in the parallel which Rousseau claimed in giving the title of the _Nouvelle Heloïse_ to his Savoyard letters. The accidental resemblance of the religious costume is wanting here, but, on the other hand, there is a greater show of character. Rousseau has confused the Heloise of 1117 and the abbess of the letters. From another point of view, one would like to know what Bussy-Rabutin or Colardeau would have thought of the _Nouvelle Heloïse_ as the expression of an absorbing passion. Rousseau, who held that the _Portuguese Letters_ had been written by a man, was of the singular opinion that no woman could describe, or even feel, love. The letters of his Julie are pale fires beside the first and second letters of Heloise.[22]