[1.] The Portuguese Nun, Marianna Alcaforado, was born of a distinguished Portuguese family in the second half of the seventeenth century. About 1662, while still a nun, she fell in love with a French officer, the Chevalier de Chamilly, to whom she addressed her famous letters. The worthiness of the object of her passion may be judged by the fact that, on his return to Paris, the Chevalier handed over these letters to Sublingy, a lawyer, to be translated and published. They appeared in 1669, published by Barbin, under the title Lettres Portuguaises, and have since been often reprinted. Marianna Alcaforado died at the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century.
There are only five original letters, though many editions contain the seven spurious letters, attributed to a "femme du monde"—they are already in Barbin's second edition.
There is an admirable seventeenth-century English translation of her letters by Sir Roger L'Estrange.
The passion of Héloïse for Abelard hardly calls for commentary. There is no clue to the identity of Captain de Vésel and Sergeant de Cento. A note in Calmann-Lévy's edition tells us that, in reply to enquiries about these two mysterious people, Stendhal said that he had forgotten their stories.
[2.] Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, by the famous Marquis de Sade, was published in Holland, 1791.
[3.] Cf. Coleridge, Love's Apparition and Evanishment:—
... Genial Hope,
Love's eldest sister.
[4.] Cf. Chapter VIII, p. [35] below. The ideas contained in these two passages are the germ of a story written by Stendhal with the obvious intention of illustrating his theories. The story—"Ernestine"—is included in the Calmann-Lévy edition of De l'Amour.
[5.] Cf. a letter of Sir John Suckling "to a Friend to dissuade him from marrying a widow, which he formerly had been in love with":—
"Love is a natural distemper, a kind of Small Pox: Every one either hath had it or is to expect it, and the sooner the better."