Isola

by Allegra Goodman

Vanity, vanity, taught Madame D’Artois. Everything we treasure has a price. And everything we have will slip away. She told us we were dust and our lives brief as grass. We might understand this if we were truly wise—but I lacked wisdom.

“We will come with you, Damienne and I. We will start our own order, Sisters of Claire, and all around our cloister, we will build high walls. We will adore the Virgin, and sew and walk together, and never let men in.”

We were prisoners of love—but not as poets would describe it. We had lost hope and equanimity, but not for any passion of our own. The lust of a young man confined us. His wealth and his position trapped us upstairs.

And so, my daughter, devote yourself entirely to acquiring virtue and behave so that your reputation endures and that, in all things, you are truly honest, humble, courteous, and loyal. Understand that if even a small fault or untruth were to be found in you, it would be a great disgrace.

She said, “Remember Dido.” By this, she meant it is a sin to destroy yourself for love.

was blessed to witness such a thing. I did not deserve to see such beauty, and yet this wonder spread itself before me. And I felt God’s presence as I had never done in grief and anger; I knew it in my insignificance. I had given up, and yet God came to me in winter and in ice, in the hard world and in the night.

This was my prayer. Not for rescue or escape, but for my soul, which had been sick. I gazed at waves rising and shattering, and this was my resolve—to remember myself as God remembered me.

“Those who know their faults are truly wise,” the Queen said. “And those who have endured the worst have most to teach. Do not say, then, that your story does not deserve retelling. Tell me, rather, how I might reward you for offering what you have learned.”