worker, secluding himself from society. "The assiduity of my application
to study," he says, "prevented my associating with refined ladies, and I
had hardly any acquaintance with women outside of the church." The
purity of his morals was only less famous than his intellect; he says
that the notion of associating, as many churchmen of the time did, with
coarse women was odious to him.
But suddenly over this man already middle-aged, and, as one might
suppose, established in self-control mentally and physically, there came
a reaction. Reputation had become an old story, his enthusiasm for
philosophy seemed to dwindle when he believed himself the first
philosopher of the world; no doubt, too, the intellectual pressure of
his work had so worn upon him as to make a change of interests
impulsive. So Abelard turned to divert himself with immoral indulgences,
and at thirty-eight began the life of passion.
Several years before this, a story had begun to circulate that another
canon of Notre-Dame, Fulbert by name, had a remarkable niece. She was
then only a little girl in a nunnery at Argenteuil, but year by year the
accounts of her precocity grew more astonishing, and by the time she was
sixteen we are told that she was talked about through the whole kingdom.
This was Heloise, and her uncle--people did not know whether he was
prouder or fonder of her. He brought her back to his own house near the
cathedral, and Abelard met her to find the reports of her learning had
not been exaggerated, and--something more interesting--to find that she
was not merely a scholar, that she was a genius. The modern accounts of
this famous story that I have seen (most of them mere imitations of one
or two authors who really have taken the trouble to study the originals)
declare that Heloise was uncommonly beautiful, but there seems to be no
authority for this. Abelard says only, "_per faciem non infirma_"--"not
lowest in beauty, but in literary culture highest." Making allowance for
his rhetorical contrast, we may say, without intensives, that she was
attractive as well as brilliant.
We should have to read a good many indecent chronicles, and get
thoroughly familiar with Don Juan prototypes, to find as cold-blooded a
story of seduction as this that follows. We have it from Abelard's own
pen, told in perfectly calm language, a clear-cut narrative without the
slightest tremor of confession about it. He was delighted with her
loveliness, her youth and innocence, her fame, and most of all with her
brilliancy. He says that he believed no woman whom he might honor with
his regard could resist the combination of his personal qualities and
his reputation. But he wished cultivated, congenial companionship in his
amours, and deliberately resolved to betray this girl of sixteen under
the disguise of her teacher. At his own application, Fulbert received
him as a lodger, the board to be paid by private instruction of his
niece. "He gave the lamb to me, a wolf"--such is Abelard's well-chosen
metaphor. She was to be taught at any hours, day or night, that her
tutor found convenient. She was to obey him in everything, and if he
thought fit it was enjoined upon him to discipline her with the rod. "To
such an extent," Abelard remarks, "was he blinded by his trust in his
niece, and by my reputation for strict morality."
Nothing could be more repulsive than the coldly deliberate wickedness of
Abelard's plan, and it would be time thrown away to attempt any
extenuation of it. But the crime once committed, it is a relief to find
something in addition to brute passion present in the unscrupulous
seducer. The girl who had fascinated him, won from him as complete love
as his nature was capable of giving. Week by week he resigned himself
more and more to his happiness, he neglected the school, his lectures
were only the repetition of formerly acquired views, and he wooed
philosophy for no new truths. Even the perfunctory teaching that he did
grew irksome to him, and his knowledge of the great sadness, groans, and
lamentations that he tells arose among his followers, was powerless to
break the spell. For it was only a spell: he was pre-eminently an
intellectual man with superficial affections; his heart was given to
philosophy, and the only permanent passion of his life was ambition. But
little as the praise is, to that little extent it is to his credit that
where he had planned for himself a holiday from mental and moral
severity, in which he was to enjoy relaxation selfishly and viciously at
Heloise's undivided cost, he found his better nature captured by this
loveliest representative of womanhood in its fullest and most
exceptional combination of elements that mediaeval history has made known
to us. After all, Abelard was not wholly destitute of the moral
sensibilities: I believe no narrator of this story has called attention
to his love for his old home in Brittany, or to his family's devotion to
him and reliance on his guidance, or to the tenderness with which he
mentions his mother. In spite of all the viciousness in his early and
the hardness in his later treatment of Heloise, we may credit him with
real affection for her, from the early days of his crime.
For a man of Abelard's force and finish of mind, such a refined
companionship must have been the first of pleasures. There are
traditions, not to be accepted too credulously, that Heloise was a
larger scholar than her lover, and could read Hebrew and Greek--those
rarest accomplishments of mediaeval learning. That at least she knew
Latin literature well, we have abundant evidence, and the most positive
proof that her scholarship was refined and appreciative, that she felt
poetry as well as understood it. Her mind responded also to the
theological interests of the thinkers of the age, she was at home in the
church fathers, and learned from Abelard the main principles of his
philosophical doctrine. In trying to conceive a character when
information is so fragmentary as ours here, we are no doubt in some
danger of making fanciful biography. Three letters of her own, several
of Abelard's to her, and his autobiography, a few slight contemporary
hints--these materials leave some important points of her character
undeveloped. But given certain suggestions, our imaginative instincts
cannot go far wrong, provided the inferences of sympathetic
interpretation are held in check by judgment. These guides teach us to
see in the girl Heloise an extraordinary combination of thoughtfulness
and bright temper, active thinking and religious deference, accurate
scholarship (after the fashion of mediaeval schools) and aesthetic
sensibility, passion and maidenly delicacy. To this last quality Abelard
has borne complete testimony, and her own letters supply any evidence
needed. Absorbed though her whole nature was in her love, her lover
himself has let us know that her modesty had to be conquered more than
once by blows.
Her mind was mastered by the greatness of his reputation, her eye was
taken with his beauty, her imagination was fascinated by his universal
charm: it is no wonder that she was flattered and bewitched into loving
him. But the completeness and devotion and ecstatic self-oblivion of the
love she gave him is a wonder. Her generous faith, though to an
undeserving object, communicates to the ineffective results of her life
an ideal value; by a supreme self-forgetting, she rendered herself
worthy to be always remembered.
Abelard's was a stormy life in a stormy age, when the scholars fought
quite as bitterly as the soldiers, and the last forty-four years of
Heloise's life were the tragedy of being buried alive, unable to die.
But for a few months in this year 1118, both found perfect happiness. We
have a pretty picture outlined for us of the way their time went.
Abelard says: "We used to have our books open, but we talked more of
love than about the reading, there were more kisses than ideas. Love
made pictures of each of us in the other's eyes more often than we
turned our eyes upon the books."
Every now and then this great philosopher appeared in a new role. As to
most of the highest men, Nature had given him a great deal more than
brains. He had a wonderfully fine voice, was fond of music, and as poets
in those days went, he was a poet. He had stopped constructing
dialectics, but his mind could not be inactive; so he took up the art of
song-writing and song-making, and wrote love-lyrics and many of them,
almost all directly in the praise of Heloise. Nor was he content to
praise her to her own ears alone; the man was past all prudence in the
violence of his new absorption. He let others hear them, and no doubt
his hateful egotism was flattered by the thought that the most
fascinating girl in all France would thus become known as his mistress.
The lyrics at once caught the popular fancy; we hear of them as
spreading over the country, sung everywhere by the light-minded. Many
years later, Heloise wrote that if any woman's heart could have resisted
Abelard's other magic, to read his songs and to hear him sing them would
surely have conquered her.
The neglect of his work, and the notoriety of these love-ditties after a
while made public Abelard's real relation to his pupil. Yet for some
time after the world at large understood it, the devoted uncle and
guardian of the girl heard nothing, and after the rumors did begin to
reach him, he obstinately refused to believe them. Nothing in the whole
history shows the essential goodness of Heloise more significantly than
the canon Fulbert's complete incredulity; for as the event proved, his
nature was not so gentle as to repudiate harsh thoughts without the
strongest prepossessions. When the truth was forced upon him, his
distress was so intense that even the cold-hearted Abelard was compelled
to pity him. But if Abelard pitied the uncle, how much greater his
distress for the niece, and greater still, unfortunately, his
apprehension for himself. Egotist he proved himself, but he proved
himself also Heloise's real lover. "First we lived together in one
house," he says, "but at last in one soul." In the crash of public
disgrace, "neither of us complained of personal suffering, but each for
the suffering that came to the other," and the bodily separation that
ensued, he says with a touch of real feeling, was "the greatest linking
of our souls."
Soon after the separation, Abelard discovered that Heloise required more
care and comforts than the heart-broken and embittered Fulbert would be
likely to provide, and he devised and carried through a plan to take
her back to his own country, to his sister's house. There, amid the
scenes of her lover's boyhood, in that Brittany whose legend and poetry
have blessed us with so many of our loveliest romances, this heroine of
a deeper romance than any of fiction found a home for several months. We
may guess that the home was pleasant to her, for the lady with whom she
lived afterwards entered the abbey of which Heloise was prioress.
Abelard meanwhile was continuing his lectures in Paris, fearing--he
seems to have been at all times a great deal of a coward--the personal
violence from Heloise's family which the fierce habits of the age gave
him reason to anticipate. At last the distress of Fulbert touched his
better feeling into the wish to give him comfort, this long separation
from Heloise he found hard to support, and his fear of revenge
constantly increased. These motives induced a promise to rectify his
offence by marriage. He made only one condition--that the marriage
should be secret.
On the whole, this is perhaps the most favorable exhibition of himself
that Abelard ever made. With all deductions for selfish considerations,
it is reasonable to allow some weight to moral feeling, and a good deal
more to devotion for the girl. This renders it all the sadder to find
him some sixteen years later referring to this best act of his life with
a feeble apology. "Let no one," he entreats, "wonder at my offer of
marriage, who has felt the power of love, and known how the greatest men
have been overthrown by woman."
Even here when his feeling for Heloise seems strongest, we see that his
selfish ambition was stronger still. Secular as his tastes were, bound
to the church by his intellectual side only, he still hoped to rise to
ecclesiastical dignities and power. From very early times the
disposition for a celibate clergy had been strong, and five years before
Abelard's birth Hildebrand had declared that no married priest should
have any part in the celebration of the mass. Quite apart from all
questions of marriage, Abelard seems to have had scarcely any chance of
distinguished clerical dignity; the student crowds might follow him, but
the leaders of the church were dead set against his rationalism; they
feared and hated the arrogant and progressive thinker. If Abelard had
acted like a man, and had openly chosen married love with the girl whose
mind and heart were, either of them, better than the best of life's
other gifts, the misfortunes of his distressed later career might have
been avoided, and Heloise, after a happy and lovely life, would be no
more remembered to-day than the flowers she had gathered, or the birds
she heard sing. But because the man, not quite unprincipled, was yet not
true, he brought death upon his own good name, and upon Heloise a
melancholy life with which she paid too dear for all the remembrance and
love that the ages have given her. To his selfishness we owe the
sweetest and saddest story which the middle ages have bequeathed us; but
we think of the words of Demodocus, as he recites in the Odyssey the
story of heroes dead: "This the gods contrived, and for these they
ordained destruction, so that the people of times to come might have a
song."
His mind once made up, Abelard started for Brittany, to see the son of
whose birth he had just heard, and to take back the mother as his bride.
But when this resolution was known to Heloise, he met an unexpected
opposition. She said she did not wish him to marry her, and persisted in
her refusal.
Unwomanly does it appear, this unwillingness of Heloise to become her
lover's wife? She knew Abelard's vehement ambition, the impossibility of
its being satisfied if he was known to be a married man, the practical
certainty that her family would prefer the redemption of her reputation
to her husband's success. So she told Abelard that to marry her would be
dangerous to him,--but still more, that it would be disgraceful. She
talked to him in the role of a learned and ascetic mediaeval preacher;
she seems to draw a monk's rough robe about her girlish figure, to
disguise her tones, and to muffle her bright face in a cowl. We have
long, formally rendered objections, a crowd of citations from the Bible,
Cicero, Theophrastus, Jerome, Josephus, Augustine,--to prove marriage
less honorable than celibacy, devotion to knowledge a duty not to be
interfered with by the responsibilities and annoyances of a family,
conformity to the rules of the church the highest obligation. Her desire
for his own greatness completely overshadows her passion for his love.
He is already the first of philosophers, but if he has outrivalled
others, he must go on to surpass himself. For this, he must have quiet
and solitude, freedom for thought. She quotes a Roman maxim that all
things are to be neglected for philosophy. What monks endure through
love of God, the thinker ought to endure from devotion to truth. If
laymen and gentiles have lived thus continently, bound by no religious
profession, what does it become a clerk and a canon to do? "If you
regard not God, at least care for philosophy."
"For what harmony is there," she asks, "between a scholar and a nurse, a
writing-desk and a cradle, books and spinning-wheels? Who when absorbed
in religious or philosophic meditation can endure hearing children cry,
or having to listen to the lullabies of the woman who soothes them? Rich
people can get along, for they have abundant room and plenty of
servants; but scholars are not rich." She has difficulty in keeping
herself disguised: in the excess of her feeling she throws out her arms,
and discloses the gracious outline of the unselfish woman. Then, after
reasoning, come personal pleadings. Is he sacrificing himself for her?
She is content as she is. Now she holds him by the free gift of that
love and favor to which he would have a claim in marriage. Does he
believe she feels herself disgraced by this relation? To be called his
mistress is dear and ennobling to her. Years later when she was past her
middle life, she wrote to Abelard that "the name of mistress, or even of
harlot, was sweeter to me then the holier name of wife, so that by my
greater humiliation I might gain greater favor and less injure thy fame.
I call God to witness that if Augustus would have set me by himself at
the head of the whole world, it would have seemed to me more dear and
noble to be called thy mistress than his empress."
Thus by argument, authority, protestation that her sacrifice is choice,
she tries to conquer his decision. Nay, she throws aside the cowl
entirely, and by her natural bright humor tries to banter him into
acquiescence. "And then think," she says in substance, "what a plague a
wife is to a man. Only imagine" (and she laughs, and Abelard laughs too,
at the inconceivable grotesqueness of the idea), "imagine what a shrew I
might turn out! I might treat you as Xanthippe treated _her_
philosopher." She reminds him of the passage where Jerome tells the
story about Socrates' wife having fretted and scolded and raged one day
through the house with desperate temper, until she wound up by throwing
a basin of dirty water over him:
"He took it patiently, and wiped his head:
'Rain follows thunder,'--that was all he said."
To Abelard's credit, this impassioned unselfishness strengthened,
instead of weakening, his resolution. Heloise was forced to yield, but
her instincts saw the dark shadows gathering about them: with sobs and
tears she exclaimed, "In the ruin of both of us not less pain is to
follow than was the love that came before."
Leaving the child with his aunt the lovers returned to Paris; there they
were married in great secrecy, and at once separated. After this they
met but seldom, and then with careful precautions against their
interviews becoming known. Heloise's family, however, as she had feared,
determined to redeem her good name by announcing that Abelard had made
her honorable reparation. When people came to her and asked if it was
really true that she was the canon's wife, she denied the story angrily.
When her uncle and other relatives contradicted her contradiction, the
girl took religion's holiest name in vain, in her asseverations that
Abelard was not her husband. Fulbert lost all patience, and attempted by
cruelty and indignity to drive her to confess the truth. She told
Abelard of what she suffered, and one night he contrived to steal her
away from her uncle and to carry her back to her old nunnery at
Argenteuil, where she assumed most of the dress of the order, and
received only occasional visits from him.
The conjecture that Abelard designed to keep her there, and as soon as
his attachment could be weaned to make her take the vows and thus save
himself from all further trouble, suggests itself to us to-day: with
greater force, it occurred to the people immediately concerned. The rage
of the uncle and his friends at Abelard's treachery, first and last, to
themselves, and at his heartlessness toward the girl whose worth they
understood so well, grew uncontrollable; they bribed a servant to admit
them to his house by night, and avenged themselves.
Abelard's spirit was broken, as he saw all hopes of ecclesiastical
promotion at an end, and his fame turned to notoriety. Heretofore his
public appearances had made the sensation of a king's: "What region did
not burn to see you!" asked Heloise. "Who, when you walked abroad, did
not hurry to look at you, rising on tiptoe and with straining eyes?" But
now every look he fancied scornful.
In this wild age there was always one refuge for the victims of the
world or of themselves. To the monasteries flocked all classes, from
fashionable knights broken down or unsuccessful or weary of conflict, to
the half-witted clowns sheltered and utilized as lay-brethren. Husbands
forsook their wives, and wives fled from their husbands, to take shelter
in the religious life. In this early part of the twelfth century,
monastic houses were multiplying like hives of bees, constantly sending
out from themselves colonies that quickly became parents of others. For
some time the tendency had been to an easier discipline than the
traditional, but at last asceticism had blazed out anew, and the rich
and luxurious Cluny paled in popularity before Clairveaux or the Grande
Chartreuse. In this single century the Cistercians expanded from one
abbey to eight hundred, a single one of which is said to have
controlled seven hundred benefices. The one meal a day, the hard manual
labor, the restricted sleep, the wearisome routine of prayer, reading,
and penance, won by their very severity and by the mystical impression
of sanctity and immortal safety which brooded about these retired
prisons of self-condemned sin.
"Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain,"
was the cry with which multitudes approached the gates that should
emancipate them from a freedom which did not satisfy. Ben Jonson's fear
lest his inclination to God might be
"Through weariness of life, not love of thee,"
was realized in the case of numbers of convertites quite equalling and
probably far exceeding those who entered the ascetic orders from the
enthusiasm of visionaries. To this retirement, as a screen from the
world's curiosity and fancied mocks, Abelard now resolved to withdraw,
as his father and mother in their later lives had done before him. His
jealousy could not leave Heloise behind, so he told her of his purpose,
and hoped that she would volunteer to imitate him. But Heloise made no
such offer. In every way hers was a mind beyond her age, and the
unnatural harshness of cloistral discipline, its artificial dreariness,
its "hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell," seemed to her fine
insight untrue. Though she had suffered, she was yet in tune with life;
her heart assured her that innocent pleasure is the soul's hymn of
praise to God; bitterly as she shared her husband's misery, she saw no
reason for separating her life and his; most of all, she revolted from
the notion of professing religion with lip-service only. But Abelard
urged, insisted, even commanded, and, seeing it to be his wish, the
girl-wife yielded. She told herself that only she was responsible for
her husband's afflictions; except for her, his prosperity would have
continued undimmed; so the day was fixed on which, in her old nunnery,
she should take the vows of perpetual seclusion.