After a multitude of useless endeavours I begin to persuade myself that it is a superfluous trouble to strive to free myself; and that it is sufficient wisdom to conceal from all but you how confused and weak I am.  I remove to a distance from your person with an intention of avoiding you as an enemy; and yet I incessantly seek for you in my mind; I recall your image in my memory, and in different disquietudes I betray and contradict myself.  I hate you!  I love you!  You call me your master; it is true you were entrusted to my care.  I saw you, I was earnest to teach you; it cost you your innocence and me my liberty.  If now, having lost the power of satisfying my passion, I had also lost that of loving you, I should have some consolation.  But I find myself much more guilty in my thoughts of you, even amidst my tears, than in possessing you when I was in full liberty.  I continually think of you; I continually call to mind your tenderness.”

He explains some of the means he has tried to make himself forget.  He has tried several fasts, and redoubled studies, and exhausted his strength in constant exercises, but all to no purpose.  “Oh, do not,” he exclaims, “add to my miseries by your constancy.  Forget, if you can, your favours and that right which they claim over me; allow me to be indifferent.  Why use your eloquence to reproach me for my flight and for my silence?  Spare the recital of our assignations and your constant exactness to them; without calling up such disturbing thoughts I have enough to suffer.  What great advantages would philosophy give us over other men if, by studying it, we could learn to govern our passions?  What a troublesome employment is love!”

Then he tries to excuse himself for his original betrayal.  “Those charms, that beauty, that air, which I yet behold at this instant, occasioned my fall.  Your looks were the beginning of my guilt; your eyes, your discourse, pierced my heart; and, in spite of that ambition and glory which tried to make a defence, love was soon the master.”  Even now “my love burns fiercer amidst the happy indifference of those who surround me.  The Gospel is a language I do not understand when it opposes my passion.  Void of all relish for virtue, without concern for my condition and without application to my studies, I am continually present by my imagination where I ought not to be, and I find I have no power to correct myself.”  He advises her to give up her mind to her holy vocation as a means of forgetting him.  “Make yourself amends by so glorious a choice; make your virtue a spectacle worthy of men and angels.  Drink of the chalice of saints, even to the bottom, without turning your eyes with uncertainty upon me.  To forget Heloise, to see her no more, is what Heaven demands of Abelard; and to expect nothing from Abelard, to forget him even as an idea, is what Heaven enjoins on Heloise.”