Letters 106.78–108.2

On the hundred and twenty-ninth: 'Because of your law I have waited for you, Lord.' You say you found in the Greek, 'because of your name,' and we admit that more copies are found so. But since we are devoted to the truth, we must say simply what is in the Hebrew. For 'name' or 'law' among them one reads thira, which Aquila rendered phobon, that is, 'fear,' Symmachus and Theodotion nomon, that is, 'law,' taking it for thora because of the likeness of the letters yod and waw, which differ only in size. The fifth edition rendered it 'terror,' the sixth 'word.'

On the hundred and thirty-first: 'As he swore to the Lord, he vowed a vow to the God of Jacob.' For what we translated 'vowed a vow,' you say you read in the Greek euxato, and you think it should have been translated 'prayed'; but this is wrong. For euche, according to the nature of the passage, means both 'prayer' and 'vow,' according to the text, 'Pay your vows to God,' that is, tas euchas sou.

On the hundred and thirty-fifth: 'Who made great lights.' You say you found in the Greek, 'great, alone'; but this is from the preceding verse, where we read, 'Who alone does great wonders.' So there it should be read, and here it should not be written, as superfluous.

On the hundred and thirty-seventh: 'For you have magnified your holy name above everything.' You say you found in the Greek, 'above all.' But in the Seventy it reads thus: 'For you have magnified your holy name above everything,' just as we have turned it into Latin. But know that among the Hebrews it is thus: 'For you have magnified your word above all your name.' According to the Latin edition, the sense is this: for you have magnified above every name, that is, whatever can be called holy in heaven and on earth, your Son.

On the hundred and thirty-eighth: 'For there is no word on my tongue.' For this you say you read in the Greek, 'For there is no guile on my tongue,' which only the sixth edition translated. For both the Seventy and all the translators and the Hebrew itself have either lalian or logon written, that is, 'speech' and 'word.' Indeed in Hebrew it is called mala.

On the hundred and thirty-ninth: 'They stretched out cords for a snare.' For this you say you found in the Greek, 'They stretched out cords as a snare for my feet.' But this is superfluous in this place. In the same, for 'The upright shall dwell with your countenance,' you say you found in the Greek, 'And they shall dwell'; but here too the conjunction is superfluous.

On the hundred and fortieth: 'Our bones have been scattered beside hell.' For this you say you read in the Greek, 'their bones.' But this too is superfluous.

On the hundred and forty-sixth: 'Nor will he take pleasure in the legs of a man.' For 'he' you say you read 'the Lord,' which is not there.

And since you too ask at the end of your list, and my holy son Avitus often presses me, how certain Greek words are to be translated, I have noted it briefly. Neomenia is the beginning of the month, which according to the proper usage of the Latin language we can call the kalends. But since among the Hebrews the month is reckoned by the course of the moon, and among the Greeks mene means moon, neomenia is so called as 'new moon.' Eremos means desert or solitude; thronos seat or throne; nycticorax, as we have said, owl. Kynomyia is not, as the Latins rendered it, 'dog-fly,' spelled with the Greek letter upsilon, but according to the Hebrew sense it should be written with the diphthong oi, so that it is koinomyia, that is, every kind of fly, which Aquila rendered panmyian, that is, 'fly of every sort.' And laxeuterion, for which the Latin rendered 'axe,' we translate as a kind of iron tool with which stones are dressed. Indeed, translating from the Hebrew we said thus: 'And now they have hewn down its carvings together with axe and chisels'; laxeuterion, then, can be called a chisel.

The blessed apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians and instructing the untrained church of Christ in sacred disciplines, set down among other commands this one also, saying: 'If any woman has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, let her not put away her husband. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified in the brother. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy.' If to anyone the bonds of discipline hitherto seemed too much loosened and the teacher's indulgence too hasty, let him consider the house of your father, a man indeed most distinguished and most learned, but still walking in darkness, and he will understand that the apostle's counsel has had this result, that the sweetness of the fruits makes up for the bitterness of the root, and that common twigs exude precious balsam. You were born of an unequal marriage; of you and my Toxotius Paula was born. Who would believe that the granddaughter of the pontiff Albinus would be born in answer to her mother's vow; that, with her grandfather present and rejoicing, the little one's still stammering tongue would sound out 'Alleluia'; and that even the old man would nurse a virgin of Christ in his lap? We waited well and happily. A holy and faithful house sanctifies one unbeliever. He is already a candidate for the faith whom a believing crowd of sons and grandsons surrounds. I think that even Jupiter himself, if he had had such a family, could have believed in Christ. Let him spit at my letter and laugh at it and cry out that I am foolish or mad; his son-in-law did the same before he believed. Christians are made, not born. The gilded Capitol is squalid; all the temples of Rome are covered with soot and cobwebs; the city is moved from its foundations, and the people, flooding past the half-ruined shrines, run to the tombs of the martyrs. If wisdom does not wring faith from him, let shame at least wring it.

Let this be said, Laeta, most devout daughter in Christ, so that you may not despair of your parent's salvation, but by the same faith by which you won your daughter may also receive your father, and enjoy the happiness of your whole house, knowing that promise of the Lord: 'What is impossible with men is possible with God.' Conversion is never too late. The thief passed from the cross to paradise; Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, after being made savage in heart and body and living with beasts in the desert, received back a human mind. And, to pass over ancient examples, lest they seem too much like fables to unbelievers: a few years ago your kinsman Gracchus, whose name echoes patrician nobility, when he held the prefecture of the city, did he not overturn, break, and burn the cave of Mithras and all the monstrous images by which the initiates are made Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun-runner, and Father, and, sending these ahead as hostages, obtain the baptism of Christ? Paganism suffers solitude even in the City; the gods once of the nations have been left with the eagle-owls and night-owls on the lonely rooftops. The soldiers' standards bear the emblem of the cross; the picture of the saving gibbet adorns the purple of kings and the flashing jewels of their diadems. Now even the Egyptian Serapis has become Christian; Marnas mourns shut up at Gaza and constantly trembles at the overthrow of his temple. From India, Persia, and Ethiopia we daily receive crowds of monks; the Armenian has laid down his quiver, the Huns are learning the Psalter, the cold of Scythia burns with the heat of faith; the ruddy and fair-haired army of the Getae carries tents for churches about with it, and perhaps it fights against us on equal terms because they trust in a religion like ours.

I have almost slipped into another subject, and 'while the wheel runs,' while I intended to make a pitcher, my hand has shaped a jar. For my purpose, invited by the prayers of holy Marcella and your own, was to address my words to a mother, that is, to you, and to teach you how you ought to bring up our little Paula, who was consecrated to Christ before she was born, whom you received by vows before you received her in the womb. We have seen in our own times something from the books of the prophets: Hannah exchanged the barrenness of her womb for fruitfulness; you have exchanged a sorrowful fruitfulness for living children. I say it with confidence that you will receive sons, since you gave your first offspring to the Lord. These are the firstborn that are offered under the law. So Samuel was born, so Samson came to be, so John the prophet leapt and played at Mary's coming in; for he heard the words of the Lord thundering through the virgin's mouth and longed to burst out of his mother's womb to meet him. So let her who was born of a promise have from her parents an upbringing worthy of her birth. Samuel is reared in the temple, John is prepared in the wilderness. The one is revered for his consecrated hair, drinks neither wine nor strong drink, and while still a little child converses with God; the other flees cities, is girded with a leather belt, is fed on locusts and wild honey, and, as a figure of repentance, preaches clothed in the skins of the most twisted of animals.

So must a soul be trained that is to be a temple of the Lord. Let her learn to hear nothing else and to say nothing else than what belongs to the fear of God. Let her not understand foul words, let her not know the songs of the world; let her tongue, while still tender, be steeped in the sweet Psalms. Let the wanton age of boys be kept far away; let even her maids and attendants be kept from worldly company, lest they teach worse what they have badly learned. Let letters be made for her of boxwood or ivory, and let them be called by their names. Let her play with them, so that her play may also be instruction; and let her not only keep the order of the letters, so that her memory of their names passes into a song, but let the order itself be often mixed up, the last with the middle, the middle with the first, so that she may know them not only by sound but also by sight. When she begins to guide the stylus in the wax with trembling hand, either let her tender fingers be guided by another's hand laid over them, or let the letters be cut into a tablet, so that her strokes, confined within the edges, are drawn along the same grooves and cannot wander outside. Let her join syllables for a prize, and be enticed by little gifts that can delight that age. Let her also have companions in learning, whom she may envy and whose praises may sting her. She is not to be scolded if she is slower, but her talent is to be roused by praise; let her rejoice when she has won and grieve when she has been beaten. Above all, care must be taken that she does not hate her studies, lest a bitterness conceived in infancy should last beyond the years of childhood. The very names by which she will gradually become used to putting words together should not be chosen at random but fixed and collected on purpose, namely those of the prophets and apostles, and let the whole line of patriarchs from Adam come down from Matthew and Luke, so that while she is doing something else she is being prepared for later memory. A teacher of approved age, life, and learning must be chosen; nor, I think, will a learned man blush to do for a kinswoman or a noble virgin what Aristotle did for the son of Philip, when he himself, like a common copyist, taught him the first elements of letters. Things are not to be despised as small without which great things cannot stand. The very sound of the letters and the first teaching of the instructor come out differently from a learned mouth and from a rustic one. So you too must take care not to let your daughter get used, through the foolish caresses of women, to saying words by halves, and to playing in gold and purple; the one harms the tongue, the other the character; lest she learn in tender years what she must afterwards unlearn. The speech of their mother is written to have contributed much from infancy to the eloquence of the Gracchi; Hortensia's oratory grew up in her father's lap. What untrained minds have drunk in is hard to erase. Who can bring back purple-dyed wool to its first whiteness? A new jar long keeps the taste and smell with which it was first steeped. Greek history tells that Alexander, the mightiest of kings and conqueror of the world, could not rid himself, in his manners and his gait, of the faults of his tutor Leonides, with which he had been infected as a little boy. For the imitation of bad things is easy, and you quickly imitate the vices of those whose virtue you cannot attain. Let her nurse herself not be given to drink, not wanton, not talkative; let her have a modest nursemaid and a serious foster-father. When she sees her grandfather, let her leap onto his breast, hang on his neck, and sing 'Alleluia' to him whether he likes it or not. Let her grandmother snatch her up; let her recognize her father with smiles; let her be lovable to all, and let the whole family rejoice that a rose has been born among them. Let her learn at once whom she has as her other grandmother, whom as her aunt, for what emperor and for what army she is being reared as a young recruit. Let her long for them, let her threaten you with going away to them.

Let her very dress and clothing teach her to whom she is promised. Take care not to pierce her ears, not to paint with white lead and rouge the face consecrated to Christ, not to weigh down her neck with pearls and gold, not to load her head with jewels, not to dye her hair red and so presage for her something of the fires of Gehenna. She has other pearls, which she will later sell to buy the most precious pearl. Praetextata, once a very noble lady, at the command of her husband Hymetius, who was the paternal uncle of the virgin Eustochium, changed Eustochium's dress and appearance and arranged her neglected hair in waving tiers, wishing to overcome both the virgin's resolve and her mother's desire. And behold, that same night she sees in her sleep an angel come to her with a terrible face, threatening punishment and uttering these words: 'Have you dared to put your husband's command before Christ? To handle the head of a virgin of God with sacrilegious hands? They shall wither now, so that you may feel in torment what you have done, and at the end of the fifth month you shall be led to hell. And if you persist in your crime, you shall be bereaved both of your husband and of your children.' All was fulfilled in order, and a swift death set the seal on the unhappy woman's late repentance. So Christ avenges those who violate his temple, so he defends his jewels and most precious ornaments. I have told this not because I wish to mock the misfortunes of the unhappy, but to warn you with how much fear and care you ought to keep what you have promised to the Lord.

Eli the priest offended the Lord because of the vices of his children; a man cannot become a bishop who has children who are dissolute and not in subjection. On the contrary, it is written of the woman that she will be saved through the bearing of children, if they continue in faith and love and holiness with modesty. If children of full age and their own masters are charged to their parents, how much more a child still at the breast, frail, and who, according to the Lord's word, does not know her right hand from her left, that is, does not know the difference between good and evil! You take anxious care that your daughter is not bitten by a viper; why do you not take the same care that she is not struck by the hammer of the whole earth, that she does not drink from the golden cup of Babylon, that she does not go out with Dinah and wish to see the daughters of a strange land, that she does not play with her feet and trail her gowns? Poisons are given only when smeared with honey, and vices deceive only under the appearance and shadow of virtues. 'And how,' you will say, 'are the sins of the fathers not visited on the children, nor those of the children on the parents, but the soul that sins, it shall die?' This is said of those who can understand, of whom it is written in the Gospel, 'He is of age; let him speak for himself.' But he who is a little child and thinks as a child, until he comes to years of discretion and the letter of Pythagoras brings him to the fork of the road, has both his bad and his good deeds charged to his parents; unless perhaps you think that the children of Christians, if they have not received baptism, are themselves alone guilty of sin, and that the crime is not charged to those who would not give it, especially at a time when those who were to receive it could not object; just as, on the other hand, the salvation of infants is the gain of their elders. Whether to offer your daughter or not was in your power, though your case is different, since you vowed her before you conceived her; but to neglect her once offered is at your own peril. He who offers a lame or maimed victim, or one marked with any defect, is guilty of sacrilege; how much more will he be punished who, preparing a part of his own body and the purity of an untouched soul for the embraces of the King, proves negligent!

When she begins to be a little bigger and, after the example of her Bridegroom, to grow in wisdom and stature and favour with God and men, let her go with her parents to the temple of her true Father, but let her not come out of the temple with them. Let them seek her on the road of the world, among the crowds and the throng of relatives, and let them find her nowhere else than in the sanctuary of the Scriptures, questioning the prophets and apostles about the spiritual marriage. Let her imitate Mary, whom Gabriel found alone in her chamber, and who was perhaps struck with fear because she saw a man, which she was not used to. Let her emulate her of whom it is said, 'All the glory of the king's daughter is within'; and let her, wounded by love's chosen dart, say, 'The king has brought me into his chamber.' Let her never go out, lest those who go about the city find her, strike and wound her, take away the veil of her modesty, and leave her naked in her blood; but rather, when anyone knocks at her door, let her say, 'I am a wall, and my breasts are a tower. I have washed my feet; I cannot defile them.'

Let her not eat in public, that is, at her parents' banquets, nor see foods that she may desire. And though some think it a greater virtue to despise a pleasure that is present, I think it a safer continence not to know what you would long for. I once read as a boy in school: 'You will hardly blame what you allow to become habit.' Let her learn even now not to drink wine, 'in which is debauchery.' But before the years of full strength, severe abstinence is dangerous for the young. Until that time, if need requires, let her go to the baths, use a little wine for her stomach's sake, and be sustained by eating meat, lest her feet fail before she begins to run. And I say this by way of indulgence, not of command, fearing weakness, not teaching self-indulgence. Otherwise, what the Jewish superstition does in part, in abjuring certain animals and foods, and what the Brahmans of India and the gymnosophists of Egypt observe with a diet of only barley-meal, rice, and fruit, why should not a virgin of Christ do in full? If glass is worth so much, why should not a pearl be worth more? Let her who was born of a promise live as those lived who were begotten of a promise. Let equal grace have equal toil. Let her be deaf to musical instruments; let her not know why the pipe, the lyre, and the harp were made.

Let her render you each day a fixed portion of the Scriptures. Let her learn by heart a set number of Greek verses. Let Latin learning follow at once; if it does not shape the tender mouth from the beginning, the tongue is spoiled by a foreign accent and the native speech is soiled by foreign faults. Let her have you as her teacher; let her untrained infancy admire you. Let her see nothing in you or in her father which would be a sin if she did it. Remember that you are the parents of a virgin and can teach her more by example than by word. Flowers soon perish; a noxious wind soon spoils violets, lilies, and crocuses. Let her never go out in public without you; let her not visit the basilicas of the martyrs or the churches without her mother. Let no young man, no curled dandy smile at her. Let our little virgin so keep the vigil days and solemn all-night services that she does not stray a nail's breadth from her mother. I do not want her to love any one of her maids more than the rest, so as to whisper often in her ears; whatever she says to one, let all know. Let her like as a companion not a well-groomed and pretty girl who warbles a sweet song with a liquid throat, but one who is grave, pale, plainly dressed, and a little sad. Let there be set over her a virgin of mature years, of proven faith, character, and chastity, who may teach her and accustom her by example to rise at night for prayer and psalms, to sing hymns in the morning, to stand in the battle line like a warrior of Christ at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, and, when the lamp is lit, to offer the evening sacrifice. So let the day pass, so let the night find her at work. Let reading follow prayer, and prayer follow reading. The time will seem short that is filled with such a variety of tasks.

Let her also learn to work wool, to hold the distaff, to set the basket in her lap, to turn the spindle, to draw the threads with her thumb. Let her scorn silk fabrics, the fleeces of the Seres, and gold drawn out into threads. Let her make such garments as keep out the cold, not such as clothed bodies are made naked by. Let her food be vegetables and fine flour and, rarely, small fish. And, not to draw out the rules for the palate too long, on which I have spoken more fully elsewhere, let her eat so that she is always hungry, so that immediately after eating she can read, pray, and sing psalms. I dislike, especially at a tender age, long and immoderate fasts, in which weeks are joined together and oil in food and fruit are avoided. I have learned by experience that the ass on the road, when it is tired, looks for side paths. Let the worshippers of Isis and Cybele do this, who with a greedy abstinence devour pheasants and steaming turtle-doves, so as not, forsooth, to defile the gifts of Ceres. Let this be the rule in continual fasting, that lasting strength be prepared for a long journey, lest, running at the first stage, we collapse in the middle. But, as I wrote before, in Lent the sails of continence must be spread and all the charioteer's reins slackened for the horses as they hasten, though the condition of those in the world is one thing and that of virgins and monks another. The man of the world in Lent digests the gluttony of his belly and, living on his own juice like a snail, prepares his paunch for future feasts and fattening; let the virgin and the monk so give rein to their horses in Lent as to remember that they must always be running. A limited toil is greater, an unlimited one more moderate; for there we take breath, here we go on for ever.

If ever you go to your country house, do not leave your daughter at home; let her not know how, nor be able, to live without you; when she is alone, let her tremble. Let her not converse with people of the world, nor share the company of bad virgins; let her not attend the weddings of the servants, nor mix in the games of the noisy household. I know that some have laid down that a virgin of Christ should not bathe with eunuchs, nor with married women, because the former do not lay aside the spirit of men, and the latter display their unsightliness with swelling bellies. For my part, I altogether disapprove of baths for a grown virgin, who ought to blush at herself and be unable to look at herself naked. For if she wears down her body with vigils and fasts and brings it into subjection, if she desires to quench the flame of lust and the incitements of hot youth by the cold of continence, if she hastens by deliberately sought squalor to disfigure her natural beauty, why should she, on the contrary, rekindle the slumbering fires by the warmth of the baths?

Instead of jewels or silk let her love the divine books, in which what pleases her is not gold and the many-coloured painting of Babylonian parchment, but a text carefully corrected and learnedly punctuated for the sake of faith. Let her first learn the Psalter, and divert herself with these songs; and let her be trained for life in the Proverbs of Solomon. In Ecclesiastes let her grow used to trampling on the things of the world; in Job let her follow the examples of virtue and patience. Let her pass on to the Gospels, never to put them out of her hands; let her drink in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles with the whole will of her heart. And when she has enriched the storehouse of her breast with these treasures, let her commit to memory the Prophets, the Heptateuch, the books of Kings and Chronicles, and the volumes of Ezra and Esther, so that last of all she may learn the Song of Songs without danger; lest, if she read it at the beginning, not understanding the marriage song of a spiritual wedding under carnal words, she be harmed. Let her beware of all apocryphal writings; and if ever she wishes to read them, not for the truth of their doctrines but out of reverence for their signs, let her know that they are not by those whose names they bear, that many faulty things are mixed with them, and that it takes great prudence to look for gold in mud. Let her always have the little works of Cyprian in her hand; let her run through the letters of Athanasius and the books of Hilary without stumbling. Let her delight in the treatises and the minds of those in whose books the devotion of faith does not waver; let her read the rest so as to judge rather than to follow.

You will answer: 'How can I, a woman of the world, amid such crowds of people at Rome, keep all these rules?' Then do not take up a burden you cannot bear; but when you have weaned her with Isaac and clothed her with Samuel, send her to her grandmother and aunt. Give back this most precious jewel to Mary's chamber and lay her in the cradle of the crying Jesus. Let her be reared in a monastery, let her be among the choirs of virgins; let her not learn to swear, let her think lying a sacrilege, let her not know the world, let her live like an angel, be in the flesh without the flesh, and think all humankind like herself; and, to say nothing of the rest, she will at least free you from the difficulty of guarding her and the danger of keeping her. It is better for you to long for her absent than to tremble at every point: with whom she speaks, what she says, to whom she nods, whom she likes to look at. Hand over the little one to Eustochium, whose very crying is now a prayer for you; hand her over as a companion who will be the heir of her holiness. Let her see her, love her, admire her from her first years, whose speech, dress, and gait are a lesson in virtues. Let her be in the lap of her grandmother, who may repeat in the granddaughter whatever she sent ahead in her daughter, who by long practice has learned to rear, teach, and keep virgins, in whose crown the chastity of the hundredfold number is woven daily. Happy virgin, happy Paula, daughter of Toxotius, who by the virtues of her grandmother and aunt is nobler in holiness than in birth! O if it were granted you to see your mother-in-law and your sister-in-law and behold the great souls in their small bodies! Given your inborn modesty, I would not doubt that you would go ahead of your daughter and exchange God's first sentence for the second law of the Gospel. You would certainly count as little your desire for other children and would rather offer yourself to God! But since there is 'a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,' and 'the wife does not have power over her own body,' and 'let each one remain with the Lord in the calling in which he was called,' and he who is under the yoke must so run as not to leave his companion in the mud, pay back fully in your offspring what you have meanwhile postponed in yourself. Hannah, after offering to the tabernacle the son she had vowed to God, never took him back, thinking it unfitting that a future prophet should grow up in the house of one who still wished to have other sons. Indeed, after she had conceived and given birth, she did not dare approach the temple and appear empty before the Lord until she had first paid what she owed; and when such a sacrifice had been offered, she returned home and bore five children for herself, because she had borne her firstborn for God. Do you wonder at the holy woman's happiness? Imitate her faith. If you send Paula, I myself promise to be both her teacher and her foster-father. I will carry her on my shoulders, and, an old man, I will shape her stammering words, far more glorious than the philosopher of the world, since I shall be teaching not a king of the Macedonians destined to die by Babylonian poison, but a handmaid and bride of Christ, to be offered to the kingdom of heaven.

If all the members of my body were turned into tongues and all my limbs resounded with human voice, I could say nothing worthy of the virtues of the holy and venerable Paula. Noble in birth, but far nobler in holiness; once powerful in riches, but now more distinguished by the poverty of Christ; of the stock of the Gracchi, offspring of the Scipios, heir of Paulus, whose name she bears, true and genuine descendant of Maecia Papiria, mother of Africanus, she preferred Bethlehem to Rome and exchanged roofs gleaming with gold for the cheapness of shapeless mud. We do not grieve that we have lost such a woman, but give thanks that we had her, or rather have her; for all live to God, and whatever returns to the Lord is counted in the number of the family, although her loss is her dwelling in the heavenly home. As long as she was in the body she was a pilgrim away from the Lord, and she would always complain with tearful voice, saying: 'Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged; I have dwelt with those who dwell in Kedar; my soul has long been a sojourner.' And is it any wonder if she lamented that she lived in darkness (for this is what Kedar means), since the world lies in the evil one? And as its darkness, so is its light; 'and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.' Hence she would often add: 'I am a stranger and a sojourner, as all my fathers were,' and again: 'I desire to depart and be with Christ.' And whenever she was troubled by the weakness of her little body, which she had brought on by incredible abstinence and redoubled fasts, she would turn over in her mouth: 'I buffet my body and bring it into subjection, lest, having preached to others, I myself should be found reprobate'; and, 'It is good not to drink wine and not to eat meat'; and, 'I humbled my soul with fasting'; and, 'You have turned all my bed in my sickness'; and, 'I was turned about in misery while the thorn was fixed in me.' And amid the stings of pain, which she bore with wonderful patience, as if she saw the heavens opened to her, she would say: 'Who will give me wings like a dove, and I will fly away and be at rest?'

I call to witness Jesus and his holy angels, and in particular the angel who was the guardian and companion of this admirable woman, that I say nothing to curry favour, nothing in the manner of those who praise, but that whatever I am about to say I say as testimony, and that it is less than her merits, which the whole world sings, which priests admire, which the choirs of virgins long for, which the crowd of monks and the poor lament. Does the reader wish to know her virtues briefly? She left all her poor poorer than herself. Nor is it any wonder that I say this of her neighbours and her little household, the slaves and handmaids of both sexes whom she had turned into brothers and sisters, since she left Eustochium, the virgin daughter devoted to Christ, for whose consolation this little book is composed, far from her noble birth, rich only in faith and grace.