Heloïse and Abelard

At the other end of the social scale, two Parisian intellectuals, as scandalous in their tragic love as those denizens of the twentieth-century Left Bank, de Beauvoir and Sartre, have intrigued historians and poets since the beginning of the twelfth century.

Abelard, seemingly writing more than fifteen years after what he called ‘the calamity’, when fable had long since replaced truth, delivers the bare facts of an unfolding disaster in a letter to a friend. Heloïse had been raised in a convent at Argenteuil and nothing is known of her parents. It rather matters when she was born, but opinions differ. When she met Abelard she was either in her late teens or early twenties. In any case, by about 1115 she was nominatissima, most renowned, in learning, while he was master of the cathedral school at Notre-Dame and a man whose dazzling contemporary reputation at the inception of the twelfth-century Renaissance might be compared to that of Humphry Davy when he was first installed at the Royal Institution in 1801.

Abelard’s response to the prevailing philosophy, epitomised by the intellectual might of Anselm of Canterbury who said ‘I believe, so that I might understand’ (credo ut intelligam), was an insistence that he must understand in order to believe. In the early twelfth century, that was a revolutionary thought: a scientific thought.

Heloïse lived as a ward of her uncle, a wealthy canon named Fulbert who encouraged her studies. She was physically attractive and, for men of intellect, her accomplishments and self-confidence made her more so. Abelard cannot have been the only man determined to seduce her; but he was the only one bold enough to insinuate himself with her uncle, to arrange lodgings with the family, and to offer his services to her as a private tutor, with predictable results. For months, the pair abandoned themselves to physical and intellectual passion, careless of rumour and of his neglect of work. At times the relationship became violent: Abelard’s claim that he struck his lover merely in order to convince her uncle that their relationship was exclusively pedagogic is still shocking.

Eventually Fulbert guessed, or was told, that the pair were lovers and Abelard was thrown out. Heloïse and Peter, devastated by their separation, abandoned all caution and, now lacking the discretion of domestic privacy and the pretence of a formal tutorial relationship, were caught in flagrante. Shortly afterwards, Heloïse told Peter that she was pregnant. Fearing Fulbert’s wrath and seizing the opportunity while her uncle was absent from home, Peter arranged for Heloïse to be taken secretly to stay with his sister in Brittany, in whose house she bore a boy whom they named Astralabe: a ‘star catcher’.

Abelard’s folly now was to underestimate both his lover and his enemy. He went to Fulbert and offered to marry Heloïse, on condition that the marriage be kept secret to avoid further damage to his (Abelard’s) reputation. The uncle agreed. Neither thought to consult Heloïse, who refused. In her opposition to marriage her own voice is heard, loud and clear. First, she argued that her uncle’s apparent new equanimity was superficial – he would have his revenge on them both; second, that the damage to Abelard’s reputation when the truth came out would ruin him – he had been famously chaste until he met Heloïse.

What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles, books or tablets and distaffs, pen or stylus and spindles? Who can concentrate on thoughts of scriptures or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying, nurses soothing them with lullabies, and all the noisy coming and going of men and women about the house? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home?⁷

This is the selfless sacrifice of a woman for her lover. At least, that is how it is meant to be read – these, after all, are Peter Abelard’s recollections of that time, and they are turned towards himself. It seems to me that these words might also be read in quite another way: as a sentiment that would be shared by many later women intellectuals – Mary Astell^∫ and Mary Wollstonecraft spring to mind – who spurned the bonds of conventional marriage as much for their own sake as for their lovers’. Many years later, Heloïse told Peter that much of her own opposition to marriage was her disgust with the idea that she might be thought venal or possessive; that to be cast as his whore was a sweeter thought than to be seen to be offering herself for sale as a wife, which would be true prostitution.

Against her own judgement and intellectual objections, Heloïse gave in to Peter’s senses of rectitude, self-interest and guilt. They married in secret; but the news spread and now Peter sent Heloïse to Argenteuil, the convent of her childhood, as much to salvage his own position as to protect her from the outpouring of her uncle’s vitriol. Fulbert’s response was savage: his kinsmen broke into Abelard’s lodgings and mutilated him by castration.

The rest of Peter’s autobiographical letter records the many disputes, false accusations and other reverses of fortune that he had suffered since.

Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can – or I will tell you what I think and indeed everyone suspects. It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love. So when the end came to what you desired, any show of feeling you used to make went with it.⁸

Heloïse’s anger is understandable; on the other hand, one feels empathy for the emotional remoteness of her castrated lover. Her letter ends with this:

When in the past you sought me out for sinful pleasures your letters came to me thick and fast, and your many songs put your Heloïse on everyone’s lips, so that every street and house resounded with my name… I beg you, think what you owe me, give ear to my pleas, and I will finish a long letter with a brief ending: farewell, my only love.⁹

The subsequent exchanges between spurned lover and maimed philosopher are read today with as much emotional engagement as they were when collected and copied, over 700 years ago; and if, in life, they were condemned to such extreme emotional punishment and estrangement, in death they were, it seems, eventually reunited: Heloïse and Peter Abelard are said to share a tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.