Then follows an elaborate, rhetorical discourse on the disadvantages of matrimony, with careful division and subdivision, arguments from reason, from experience, from authority, and all the artifices of rhetoric and dialectics. That the learned Heloise did urge many of its curious points will scarcely be doubted, but as a careful and ordered piece of pleading against matrimony it has an obvious ulterior purpose. St. Paul is the first authority quoted; then follow St. Jerome, Theophrastus, and Cicero. She (or he) then draws an animated picture of the domestic felicity of a philosopher, reminding him of servants and cradles, infant music and the chatter of nurses, the pressing throng of the family and the helplessness of the little ones. The example of monks, of Nazarites, and of philosophers is impressively urged; and if he will not hesitate, as ‘a cleric and a canon,’ to commit himself ‘irrevocably to domestic joy,’ at least let him remember his dignity as a philosopher. The sad fate of the married Socrates is adduced, together with the thunder and rain incident. Finally, she is represented as saying that it is ‘sweeter to her and more honourable to him that she should be his mistress rather than his wife,’ and that she prefers to be united to him ‘by love alone, not by the compulsion of the marriage vow.’ When the letter containing this curious passage reached Heloise, nearly twenty years after the event, she, an abbess of high repute for holiness, admitted its correctness, with the exception that ‘a few arguments had been omitted in which she set love before matrimony and freedom before compulsion.’ Holy abbess writing to holy abbot, she calls God to witness that ‘if the name of wife is holier, the name of friend, or, if he likes, mistress or concubine, is sweeter,’ and that she ‘would rather be his mistress than the queen of a Cæsar.’ They who disregard these things in sitting in judgment on that famous liaison are foredoomed to error. But Abélard prevailed. ‘Weeping and sobbing vehemently,’ he says, ‘she brought her discourse to an end with these words: “One thing alone remains for us now, we must exhibit in our common ruin a grief as strong as the love that has gone before.”’ It is an artistic termination to Abélard’s discourse, at all events.