“I shall always have this, if you please, and it will always be agreeable to me that, when I receive a letter from you, I shall know you still remember me.  I have your picture in my room.  I never pass it without stopping to look at it.  If a picture, which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire?  We may write to each other; so innocent a pleasure is not denied us.  I shall read that you are my husband, and you shall see me sign myself your wife.  In spite of all our misfortunes, you may be what you please in your letter.  Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing.  There I shall read your most sacred thoughts; I shall carry them always about with me; I shall kiss them every moment.  I cannot live if you will not tell me that you still love me.

“When you write to me you will write to your wife; marriage has made such a correspondence lawful and since you can without the least scandal satisfy me why will you not?  I am not only engaged by my vows, but I have the fear of my uncle before me.  There is nothing, then, that you need dread.  You have been the occasion of all my misfortunes, you therefore must be the instrument of my comfort.  You cannot but remember (for lovers cannot forget) with what pleasure I have passed whole days in hearing your discourse; how, when you were absent, I shut myself from everyone to write to you; how uneasy I was till my letter had come to your hands; what artful management it required to engage messengers.  This detail perhaps surprises you, and you are in pain for what may follow.  But I am no longer ashamed that my passion for you had no bounds, for I have done more than all this.

“I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself in a perpetual imprisonment that I might make you live quietly and at ease.  Nothing but virtue, joined to a love perfectly disengaged from the senses, could have produced such effects.  Vice never inspires anything like this; it is too much enslaved to the body.  This was my cruel uncle’s notion; he measured my virtue by the frailty of my sex, and thought it was the man and not the person I loved.  But he has been guilty to no purpose.  I love you more than ever, and so revenge myself on him.  I will still love you with all the tenderness of my soul till the last moment of my life.”

Formerly, she tells him, the man was the least she valued in him.  It was his heart she desired to possess.  “You cannot but be entirely persuaded of this by the extreme unwillingness I showed to marry you, though I knew that the name of wife was honourable in the world and holy in religion; yet the name of your mistress had greater charms because it was more free.  The bonds of matrimony, however honourable, still bear with them a necessary engagement, and I was very unwilling to be necessitated to love always a man who would perhaps not always love me.  I despised the name of wife that I might live happy with that of mistress.”