His letter in some unexplained manner got round to Heloisa. She might be expected to be filled with rage and humiliation, and she sends a glowing response to the degrading recital. She outstripped Abelard in shameless frankness. Madame Guizot asserts that "she expresses much more in saying much less, that she recalls, but does not specify,"[568] the truth being that some particulars in her second letter are grosser and more precise than anything which proceeded from the pen of Abelard. The plea that her confessions were made to a husband is no extenuation, since she left his previous revelations unrebuked, and the approval of _his_ disclosures was a licence to show about _hers_. What is more, her champions discover ample evidence in her letters that they were intended for publication. "Heloisa," says Madame Guizot, "supplies details with the exactness of a dramatic personage obliged to give an account of certain facts to the audience. There are few letters of the period which have not the stamp of a literary composition destined to a public sufficiently large to render it necessary to put them in possession of the circumstances. If any persons are surprised that Heloisa could design the revelations in her first and especially in her second letter, for any eye but that of Abelard, let them read the incidents she could see recounted without offence in the _Historia Calamitatum_, and they will be convinced of the existence of a state of manners in which elevated and even delicate sentiments in a distinguished and naturally modest woman might be allied to the strangest forms of language."[569] The case is put inaccurately. The "sentiments" are not "delicate;" they are coarser than the language. The reasoning of Madame Guizot is equally defective. An immodest act is declared to be modest because Heloisa had committed a previous act of immodesty. Her toleration of Abelard's grossness is the evidence of her purity in imitating his freedoms. The appeal should have been to independent works of the time, and these are opposed to the theory of Madame Guizot. Language was often plainer than at present, but only creatures of the disgusting type of the Wife of Bath proclaimed the hidden details of their _own_ sexual licentiousness. The reputable classes had risen high above the point at which elemental decency and self-respect become extinct. Heloisa must, indeed, have been a woman of an "unbashful forehead," to use the expression of Shakespeare, if she deliberately placed herself before the public as she appears in the letters. It is far more likely that they are the fabrication of an unconcerned romancer, who speaks in the name of others with a latitude which people, not entirely degraded, would never adopt towards themselves. The suspicion is strengthened when the second party to the correspondence, the chief philosopher of his generation, exhibits the same exceptional depravity of taste. The improbability is great that