Nerto becomes a nun, but Don Rodrigue, with a band of ribald followers, succeeds in carrying her off with all the other nuns.  They are all driven by the King’s soldiers into the cemetery of the Aliscamps.  Nerto wanders away during the battle and is lost among the tombs.  At dawn the next day she strays far out to a forest, where she finds a hermit.  The old man welcomes her, and believes he can save her soul.  The Angel Gabriel visits him frequently, and he will speak to him.  But the Angel disapproves, condemns the pride of the anchorite, and soars away to the stars without a word of hope or consolation, and so in great anxiety the pious man bids her go back to the convent, and prays Saint Gabriel, Saint Consortia, Saint Tullia, Saint Gent, Saint Verdeme, Saint Julien, Saint Trophime, Saint Formin, and Saint Stephen to accompany her.

Don Rodrigue is living in a palace built for him in one night by the Devil, wherein are seven halls, each devoted to one of the seven mortal sins.  Hither Nerto wanders; here Rodrigue finds her, and begins his passionate love-making afresh.  But Nerto remains true to her vows, although the germ of love has been in her heart since the day Rodrigue saved her from the lion.  On learning that she is in the Devil’s castle, she is filled with terror, believing the fatal day has arrived.  She confesses her love.  The maiden cries:  “Woe is me, Nerto loves you, but if Hell should swallow us up, would there be any love for the damned?  Rodrigue, no, there is none.  If you would but break the tie that binds you, if, with one happy wing-stroke, you could soar up to the summits where lives last forever, where hearts vanish united in the bosom of God, I should be delivered, it seems to me, in the same upward impulse; for, in heaven or in the abyss, I am inseparable from you.”  Rodrigue replies sadly, that his past is too dreadful, that only the ocean could wipe it out.  “Rodrigue, one burst of repentance is worth a long penance.  Courage, come, only one look toward Heaven!” The Devil appears.  He swells with pride in this, his finest triumph; black souls he has in plenty, but since the beginning of his reign over the lower regions he has never captured an immaculate victim like this soul.  Rodrigue inverts his sword, and at the sign of the cross, a terrific hurricane sweeps away the palace, Don Rodrigue, and the Devil, and nothing is left but a nun of stone who is still visible in the midst of a field on the site of the chateau.  In an Epilogue we learn from the Archangel who visits the hermit that the knight and the maiden were both saved.