"It must be so", she replied, "for one of my lovers (and this man would not have deceived me, since he loved me) wrote to me that his regret at my departure had caused him to shed an ocean of tears. I saw another who assured me that for three days his eye-balls had distilled a river of tears; and as I was cursing (out of love for them) the fatal hour when they saw me, one of those who was numbered among my slaves sent to tell me that the night before his over-flowing eyes had made a flood. I was about to take myself off from the world, so that I might no longer be the cause of so many misfortunes, but the messenger added that his master had bidden him assure me there was nothing to fear, because the furnace of his bosom had dried up the flood. You may easily conjecture that the Kingdom of Lovers must be very aquatic, since with them it is but half-weeping, unless streams, fountains and torrents flow from beneath their eyelids.
"I was greatly troubled to know by what machine I could escape all the waters flowing in upon me. But one of my lovers, who was known as the Jealous, advised me to tear out my heart and then to embark in it; he added that I should not fear it would fail to hold me, because it held so many others, nor that it would sink, because it was too light, and that all I had to fear would be burning, because the matter of such a vessel was very liable to fire; and that I should set out upon the sea of his tears, that the bandage of his love would serve me as a sail and that the favourable wind of his sighs would carry me safe to port in spite of the tempest of his rivals.
"For a long time I meditated how I could put this enterprise into execution. The natural timidity of my sex prevented me from daring it; but at last the opinion I had that no man would be so foolish as to advise it if the thing were impossible, still less a lover to his mistress, gave me courage.
"I grasped a knife, I pierced my breast; already my two hands were groping in the wound and with an intrepid gaze I sought my heart to tear it out, when a man who loved me arrived. He wrested the steel away from me against my will and then asked me the motive of an action, which he called despairing. I related what had happened; but I was very surprised when a quarter of an hour later I learned that he had handed the Jealous over to justice. But the magistrates, who feared perhaps to attach too much importance to the example or the novelty of the incident, sent the case to the parliament of the Kingdom of the Just. There he was condemned to banishment for life and to end his days as a slave in the territories of the Republic of Truth, with a prohibition to all his descendants down to the fourth generation to set foot in the Province of Lovers; moreover, he was enjoined never to use hyperboles on pain of death.
"From that time on I conceived a great affection for the young man who had preserved me; and either on account of this service or because of the passion he had shown me I did not refuse him when, on the completion of his novitiate and mine, he asked me to be one of his wives.
"We have always lived comfortably together and we should still have done so had he not, as I have informed you, killed one of my children twice, for which I am about to implore vengeance in the Kingdom of Philosophers."
Campanella and I were vastly astonished at this man's complete silence; and I was about to try to console him, judging that so profound a silence was the daughter of a most profound grief, when his wife prevented me.
"'Tis not excess of grief closes his mouth, but our laws, which forbid every criminal awaiting his trial to speak except before his judges."
During this conversation the bird continued to advance, when I was astonished to hear Campanella exclaim, with a face filled with joy and delight:
"Welcome, dearest of all my friends; come, gentlemen, come", continued this good man, "let us meet Monsieur Descartes; let us descend, there he is not three leagues from here."