The following night a coach whisked away at high speed from the convent the handsome wounded knight and a young nun in breach of her vows who accompanied him.
The first year that succeeded this event was almost entirely given over to the exaltation of a love requited. The world itself for Beatrix was a new experience of pleasures that were inexhaustible. Love multiplied around her all the means of seduction able to perpetuate her error and encompass her loss. She only emerged from voluptuous dreams in order to awake amid the joy of banquets, among entertainments devised by strolling players and the concerts of minstrels. Her life was one long crazy feast in which the serious voice of reflexion, stifled by an orgy's clamours, could only have struggled to make itself heard. And yet she had not quite forgotten Mary. More than once, as she prepared to dress, her scapular had opened at the touch of her fingers. More than once she had let drop on the withered posy of the Virgin a gaze and a tear. Prayer had come more than once to her lips, like a hidden flame lurking under ash and embers, but it had been extinguished there by the kisses of her abductor, and, even in her ecstasy, a voice still told her that a prayer might have saved her!
It was not long before she felt the only lasting love is that which is purified by religion, that only the love of Our Lord and Mary gives the lie to the ups and downs of our emotions. Alone among our affections, it seems to grow and get stronger with time, while other loves burn so brightly and are spent so quickly in our hearts of ash. Nevertheless she loved Raymond as much as she could love anyone, but a day came when she saw that Raymond no longer loved her. That day made her foresee the even more atrocious day when she would be quite abandoned by the man for whom she herself had abandoned the honours of the altar, and that dreaded day also came. Beatrix now found herself, alas, with no-one to turn to on earth or in heaven. She sought in vain to console herself with memories and to take refuge in hopes. The flowers in the scapular had withered like those of her happiness. The well spring of her tears and her prayer had dried up. The fate that Beatrix had made for herself had been realised. The unfortunate woman accepted her damnation. The higher the fall on the path to virtue, the more ignominious it is, the more irreparable it is, and Beatrix had fallen from on high. At first her opprobrium frightened her, and then she ended up by getting used to it, the spring in her soul having broken. Fifteen years went by like this, and for fifteen years the guardian angel that baptism had granted to her cradle, the angel with the heart of a brother who had loved her so much, covered his eyes with his wings and wept.
Oh! How many treasures those fleeting years carried away with them! Innocence, modesty, youth, beauty, love, those roses in life that only flower once, and, in addition, conscience that compensates for all other losses! The jewels that had formerly adorned her, the impious tributes that debauchery pays to crime, provided her, for a time, with a resource too apt to dwindle. She was left alone, abandoned, an object of contempt for others as for herself, given over to the insolent disdain of vice, and hateful to virtue, a repellent example of shame and misery that mothers showed their children to turn them away from sin! She wearied of being a burden to pity, of only getting alms that a pious repugnance often nailed to the hands of charity, of only being helped on one side by people whose brows blushed to give her a piece of bread. One day she wrapped herself in her rags, which had been when new luxurious clothes. She decided to ask for her daily bread or a bed for the night from those who had not known her! She flattered herself that she could hide her infamy behind her wretchedness. She set out, the poor beggar, possessing nothing but the flowers that she had formerly taken from the Virgin's bouquet, falling now, one by one, into dust under her dried up lips!
Beatrix was still young, but shame and hunger had left on her brow the imprint of those hideous marks that reveal premature ageing. When her pale and mute face timidly begged help from passers-by, when her white and delicate hand opened jerkily to receive their gifts, there were none who did not feel that her life must have been very different at some stage. Those who were the most indifferent to her halted before her with a harsh look that seemed to say: Oh my daughter! How was it you fell from what you were? And yet her own look could no longer reply to them, for it had been a long time now since she had been able to weep. She walked on and on, on and on: her journey seemed as though it would only ever end with her death. One particular day she had been climbing since sun-up, at a bare mountain's back, a rough and rugged path, without a single house in sight to assuage her weariness. All she had eaten were some flavourless roots torn from cracks in the rocks. Her shoes, worn to shreds, had just come away from her bloodied feet. She felt herself faint with fatigue and need when, night having come, she was all of a sudden struck by the appearance of a long line of lights that were indicative of a large building. Towards these lights she made her way with all the strength left to her, but, at the chime of a silvery bell, the sound of which awoke in her heart a strange and vague memory, all the lights went out at once, and all that now remained around her were silence and night. She nevertheless took a few more steps with outstretched arms, and her trembling hands rested on a closed door. She leaned against it for a moment as if to catch her breath and tried to hold onto it so as not to fall. Her debilitated fingers let her down. They gave way under the weight of her body. "Oh holy Mary!" she cried. "Why did I leave you?" And the unhappy Beatrix passed out on the threshold.
May the wrath of heaven go easy on the guilty! Nights like this expiate a whole lifetime of sin! The keen coolness of the morning had scarcely begun to bring back to life in her a blurred and painful sense of her own identity, when she perceived that she was not alone. A woman knelt at her side was raising her head carefully, and staring at her with anxious curiosity, waiting for her to come round completely.
"God be praised," said the good sister at the convent gate, "for having sent to us so early in the day an act of mercy to perform and a sadness to alleviate! It's a happy omen for the glorious feast of the Holy Virgin that we celebrate today! But how is it, my dear child, that you did not think to pull on the bell or to use the knocker? At no time would your sisters in Jesus Christ not have been ready to receive you. Well, there we are! Don't answer me just yet, you poor lost sheep! Fortify yourself with this beef broth that I warmed up in a hurry as soon as I saw you. Taste this full-bodied wine that will put the heat back in your stomach and help you move your sore limbs again. Let me see that you're better. Drink, drink down all of it, and now, before you get up, if you don't feel strong enough to yet, put this cloak on I've thrown over your shoulders. Put those little, oh so cold hands of yours in mine so that I can restore blood and life to them. Can you feel already the circulation coming back into your fingers as I breathe on them? Oh! You'll soon be yourself again!"
Beatrix, imbued with tender feeling, grasped the hands of the worthy nun, and pressed them several times to her lips.
"I am myself again," she said, "and I feel well enough to go to thank God for the favour he has done me by guiding my steps to this holy house. Only, so that I can include it in my prayers, can you please tell me where I am?"
"And where could you be," the keeper of the gate replied, "if it is not at the convent of Our Lady of the Flowering Thorns, since there is no other monastic building in this wilderness for more than five leagues around."