It is now that the ‘Letters’ enter into the history of the lives of Marianna and Noel Bouton de Chamilly. As is well known, they were all written after the latter’s retirement from Portugal, and probably between the December of 1667 and the June of 1668, and they express better than any remarks which we could make the stages of faith, doubt, and despair through which poor Marianna passed. As a piece of unconscious, though self-made, psychological analysis they are unsurpassed; as a product of the Peninsular heart they are unrivalled. If they are not, as Theophilo Braga calls them, the only beautiful work produced by his countrymen in the seventeenth century, they are, at any rate, by far the most beautiful. To compare them, as regards literary form, with those of Heloïse would be manifestly unfair, the situation of the two women was so different.[11] Think of the Abbess of the Paraclete, mistress of all the learning of the time, and surrounded by things to console her, or at least to divert her attention, and then regard poor Marianna, persecuted by her family, and liable to the tender mercies of the Inquisition, with none of the comforts, none of the consolations of the former. But if the ‘Letters’ of Heloise are superior to those of Marianna from the point of view of correctness of expression and style, they are inferior in all else. The nun’s are far more natural, and therefore more beautiful, and the very confusion of feelings and ideas which we should expect from one in her position rather adds to their charm. Finally, the moral character of Heloïse as displayed in her epistles cannot certainly, be placed beside that of the Portuguese nun with any advantage. Henceforth, we only meet with the name of Marianna at intervals--once in 1668, again in 1676 and 1709, and lastly in an obituary notice in 1723. She, at any rate, is not an example of the well-known saying of Cervantes--‘the Portuguese die of love.’ It is true that some words at the end of the Fifth Letter seem to suggest suicide, but there is, on the other hand, throughout the whole of these _ultima verba_ an expression of energy and of her determination to tread under foot, if she cannot extinguish, the flames of her passion. Marianna came of a vigorous race, and, in spite of the great infirmities of which her obituary speaks, she lived, as we shall see, to the age of fourscore years and three.