[21] Mr. Leslie Stephen has kindly drawn my attention to Elwin’s theory (Pope’s Works) that he followed the translation of J. Hughes, author of the _Siege of Damascus_. Hughes’s ‘translation’ was little more faithful than the current French versions; it is largely a work of imagination. Careful comparison does seem to show that Pope used this version, but he seems also to have used some of the very misleading French paraphrases. Elwin himself thinks Pope did not look at the original Latin.
The charge must also be laid, though with less insistence, against the parallels which some writers have discovered, or invented, for Heloise. The most famous are the _Portuguese Letters_, a series of singularly ardent love-letters from a Portuguese nun to a French noble. The correspondents are said to have been Marianne Alcoforado and M. de Chamilly—to look at whom, said St. Simon, you would never have thought him the soul of the _Portuguese Letters_. He was neither talented nor handsome, and his liaison with the nun seems to have been no more than the usual temporary incident in a soldier’s life. When he returned to France she wrote the letters which are so frequently associated with those of Heloise. It is an unworthy and a superficial comparison. There is a ground for comparison in the condition of the writer and in the free and vivid expression of a consuming love, but they are separated by profound differences. The Portuguese nun has nothing but her love; her life is being consumed in one flame of passion. Heloise is never so wholly lost in her passion; she can regard it objectively. Even were Abélard other than he was at the time, no one who knows Heloise could conceive her, after her vows, to say, ‘if it were possible for me to get out of this miserable cloister, I should not wait in Portugal for the fulfilment of your promise,’ or imagine her, under any conditions, to talk lightheartedly to her lover of ‘the languid pleasures your French mistresses give you,’ and remind him that he only sought in her ‘un plaisir grossier.’ There is not a word, in any of the _Portuguese Letters_, of God, of religious vows, of any thought or feeling above the plane of sense, of any appreciation of the literal sacrilege of her position, of anything but a wilful abandonment to a violent passion.