Joseph McCabe

DEAD SEA FRUIT

The great cemetery of PÈre Lachaise at Paris is a city of historic tombs. Names of world-fame look down on you from the marble dwellings of the dead, as you pass along its alleys and broad avenues. Paris loves to wander there on Sundays; to scatter floral symbols of a living memory on the youngest graves, and to hang wreaths of unfading honour over the ashes of those who have fought for it and served it. The memory of the dead soon fades, they say, yet you will see men and women of Paris, on many a summer’s day, take flowers and wreaths in solemn pity to lay on the tomb of a woman who was dust seven hundred years ago. It is the grave of Heloise, and of her lover, AbÉlard.

It is scarcely necessary to say that in a serious endeavour to depict the historical Heloise much myth and legend must be soberly declined. Even historians have been seduced from their high duty in writing her praise: witness the fond exaggeration of M. de RÉmusat, which would make her ‘the first of women.’ Yet it must be admitted that impartial study brings us face to face with a very remarkable personality. This will be easily accepted in the sequel, when we have followed the course of her life to some extent—when, for instance, we see the affection and the extraordinary respect with which she inspires the famous abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable. It is more difficult to recall her at the period of her fateful meeting with AbÉlard. We have, however, the sober assurance of Peter the Venerable that, even at this early date, she was ‘of great repute throughout the entire kingdom’; and there is no reason whatever to resent AbÉlard’s assertion that she was already distinguished for her knowledge.

The mythic additions to the portraiture of Heloise refer almost exclusively to her parentage and her beauty. AbÉlard introduces her to us as the niece of a canon of the cathedral chapter, named Fulbert. It is quite clear that AbÉlard considered her such throughout life, and that it was the belief of Heloise herself; but of her parentage neither of them speaks. In strict justice, the only inference we may draw from this is that she lost her parents at an early age. We should never have known the parentage of AbÉlard but for his own autobiography. However, the tradition that has charged itself with the romance of AbÉlard’s life found in this silence a convenient pretext for weaving further romantic elements into the story. There is a pretty collection of myths about Heloise’s birth, most of them, of course, making her illegitimate. The issue of lawful wedlock is ever too prosaic and ordinary for the romantic faculty—in spite of facts. The favourite theory is that Heloise was the daughter of Canon Fulbert; even Hausrath thinks Fulbert’s conduct points to this relationship. Two other canons of Paris are severally awarded the honour by various writers. On the other hand, it was inevitable that she should be given a tinge of ‘noble’ blood, and this is traced on the maternal side. Turlot makes the best effort—from the romantic point of view—in describing her as the daughter of an abbess, who was the mistress of a Montmorency, but who gave an air of respectability to her family matters by passing for the mistress of Fulbert. From the less interesting point of view of history, we can only say that she lived with her uncle, Canon Fulbert, and we must admit that we do not know whether she was illegitimate or an orphan. But the former category was very much the larger one, even in those violent days.

It was also natural that tradition should endow her with a singular beauty: an endowment which sober history is unable to confirm. She must, it is true, have had a singular grace and charm of person. It is impossible to think that her mental gifts alone attracted AbÉlard. Moreover, in the course of the story, we shall meet several instances of the exercise of such personal power. But we cannot claim for her more than a moderate degree of beauty. ‘Not the least in beauty of countenance,’ says AbÉlard, ‘she was supreme in her knowledge of letters.’ The antithesis does not seem to be interpreted aright by those writers who think it denies her any beauty. ‘Not the least’ is a figure of rhetoric, well known to AbÉlard, which must by no means be taken with Teutonic literalness.

But that ‘repute throughout the kingdom,’ which Peter the Venerable grants her, was based on her precocious knowledge. It is generally estimated that she was in her seventeenth or eighteenth year when AbÉlard fell in love with her. She had spent her early years at the Benedictine nunnery at Argenteuil, a few miles beyond St. Denis. Her education was then continued by her uncle. Canon Fulbert has no reputation for learning in the chronicles of the time; in fact, the only information we have of him, from other sources than the story of AbÉlard, is that he was the happy possessor of ‘a whole bone’ out of the spine of St. Ebrulfus. However, it is indisputable that Heloise had a reputation for letters even at that time. Both AbÉlard and Peter of Cluny are explicit on the point; the latter says to her, in one of his admiring letters, ‘in study you not only outstripped all women, but there were few men whom you did not surpass.’ From this it is clear that the learning of Heloise was not distinguished only when compared with the general condition of the feminine mind. In fact, although Abbot Peter speaks slightingly of womanly education in general, this was a relatively bright period. We have already seen the wife and daughters of Manegold teaching philosophy at Paris with much distinction at the close of the eleventh century, and one cannot go far in the chronicles of the time without meeting many instances of a learned correspondence in Latin between prelates and women.

Nevertheless, the learning of Heloise cannot have been considerable, absolutely speaking. Her opportunities were even more limited than the erudition of her time. That she knew Hebrew is explicitly stated by AbÉlard and Peter of Cluny, and also by Robert of Auxerre; but she probably learned it (with Greek) from AbÉlard, and knew no more than he. Her Latin is good; but it is impossible to discuss here her famous Letters, which give us our sole direct insight into her personality. Learned, critical, penetrative, she certainly was, but RÉmusat’s estimate is entirely inadmissible. Beside Aspasia or Hypatia she would ‘pale her ineffectual fire.’

It is not difficult to understand how the two were brought together. Both of high repute ‘in the whole kingdom,’ or, at all events, in Paris, they could not long remain strangers. AbÉlard was soon ‘wholly afire with love of the maid,’ he tells us, and sought an opportunity of closer intercourse with her. Though Cotter Morison’s theory of the sated sensualist looking round for a dainty morsel is utterly at variance with AbÉlard’s narrative—the only account of these events that we have—it is, nevertheless, clear that AbÉlard sought the intimacy of Heloise for the purpose of gaining her love. He says so repeatedly; and, though we have at times to moderate the stress of his words, we cannot refuse to accept their substance. Mr. Poole considers the idea of a deliberate seduction on the part of AbÉlard ‘incredible.’ It is strange that one who is so familiar with the times should think this. ‘I thought it would be well to contract a union of love with the maid,’ AbÉlard says. From the circumstance that he had to approach Fulbert (who was, however, only too willing) through the mediation of friends, it does not seem rash to infer that he had had no personal intercourse with the canon and his niece. It was through her fame and, perhaps, an occasional passing glance that he had come to love her. He had, however, little diffidence about the issue. Though between thirty-five and forty years of age, he looked ‘young and handsome,’ he tells us; and we learn further from Heloise that he had gifts ‘of writing poetry and of singing’ which no female heart could resist. The ‘Socrates of Gaul’ set out on a love-adventure.

And one fine day the little world of Paris was smirking and chattering over the startling news that Master Peter had gone to live with Heloise and her uncle. The simple canon had been delighted at the proposal to receive AbÉlard. Alleging the expense of maintaining a separate house and the greater convenience of Fulbert’s house for attending the school, AbÉlard had asked his hospitality in consideration of a certain payment and the instruction of Heloise in leisure hours. It may or may not be true that Fulbert was avaricious, as AbÉlard affirms, but the honour of lodging the first master in Christendom and the valuable advantage to his niece are quite adequate to explain Fulbert’s eager acceptance. ‘Affection for his niece and the repute of my chastity,’ says AbÉlard, blinded the canon to the obvious danger, if not the explicit intention. The master was at once established in the canon’s house. One reads with pity how the uncle, blind, as only an erudite priest can be, to the rounded form and quickened pulse, child-like, gave AbÉlard even power to beat his niece, if she neglected her task.

A tradition, which seems to have but a precarious claim to credence, points out the spot where the idyll of that love was lived. In the earlier part of the present century there was a house at the corner of the Rue des Chantres (on the island, facing the Hotel de Ville), which bore an inscription claiming that ‘Heloise and AbÉlard, the model of faithful spouses, dwelt in this house.’ If we accept the vague legend, we can easily restore in imagination the little cottage of Fulbert. It lay a few yards from the water’s edge, and one could look out from its narrow windows over the gently sloping garden of the bank and the fresh, sweet bosom of the river; the quays were beyond—where the Hotel de Ville now stands—and further still outspread the lovely panorama that encircled Paris.

In a very short time master and pupil were lovers. He did assuredly fulfil his promise of teaching her. Most probably it was from him that she learned what Greek and Hebrew she knew; for AbÉlard, in later years, not only reminds her nuns that they ‘have a mother who is conversant with these tongues,’ but adds also that ‘she alone has attained this knowledge,’ amongst the women of her time. It is also clear that he taught her dialectics, theology, and ethics. But it was not long, he confesses, before there were ‘more kisses than theses,’ and ‘love was the inspirer of his tongue.’ He does not hesitate to speak of having ‘corrupted’ or seduced her, but it is only prejudice or ignorance that can accept this in the full severity and gravity of the modern term. Heloise had been educated in a nunnery; but before many years we find these nuns of Argenteuil turned on the street for ‘the enormity of their lives.’ The charge must not be taken too literally just yet, but it should make us hesitate to credit Heloise with a rigorous moral education. She lived, too, in a world where, as we saw, such liaisons were not considered sinful. It is far from likely that she would oppose any scruple to AbÉlard’s desire. Indeed, from the study of her references to their love, in the letters she wrote long years afterwards—wrote as an abbess of high repute—one feels disposed to think that AbÉlard would have had extreme difficulty in pointing out to her the sinfulness of such a love. It is with an effort, even after twenty years of chaste, conventual life, that she accepts the ecclesiastical view of their conduct. AbÉlard sinned; but let us, in justice, limit his sin at least to its due objective proportion; its subjective magnitude I shall not venture to examine.

In a few months the famed philosopher appeared in a new character, as ‘the first of the troubadours,’ to use the words of AmpÈre. ‘À mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit les passions sont plus grandes,’ said Pascal. Of all false epigrams that is surely the falsest, but it would be easily inspired by the transformation of Pierre AbÉlard. The sober-living man of forty, whom all had thought either never to have known or long since to have passed the fever of youth, was mastered by a deep, tyrannical passion. The problems of dialectics were forgotten, the alluring difficulties of Ezechiel unheeded. Day after day the murmuring throng was dismissed untaught from the cloistral school; whilst passers-by heard songs that were ardent with deep love from the windows of the canon’s house. All Paris, even all France, caught the echo, says Heloise, and ‘every street, every house, resounded with my name.’ The strange ‘Story of love and learning,’ as an old ballad expressed it, was borne through the kingdom in AbÉlard’s own impassioned words.[16]

Months ran on, and the purblind priest remained wholly unconscious of what all Paris sang nightly in its taverns. At length the truth was forced upon his mind, and he at once interrupted the love-story. He drove AbÉlard from the house, and raised the usual futile barriers to the torrent of passion. Whether the canon was really more earnest than the majority of his order, and therefore sincerely shocked at the thought of the liaison, or whether it had disturbed some other project he had formed, it is impossible to say. Heloise herself, in her sober maturity, affirms that any woman in France would have thought her position more honourable than any marriage. However that may be, Fulbert angrily forbade a continuance of the relation. Once more AbÉlard must have felt the true alternative that honour placed before him: either to crush his passion and return to the school, or to marry Heloise and sacrifice the desire of further advancement in ecclesiastical dignity.

AbÉlard was not a priest at that time. He was probably a canon of Notre Dame, but there are very satisfactory reasons for holding that he did not receive the priesthood until a much later date. In the ‘Story’ he makes Heloise address him, about this time, as ‘a cleric and canon,’ but he is nowhere spoken of as a priest. Had he been a priest, the circumstance would have afforded Heloise one of the most powerful objections to a marriage; in the curious and lengthy catalogue of such objections which we shall find her raising presently she does not mention the priesthood. But even if he were a priest, it is not at all clear that he would have considered this in itself an impediment to marriage. From the acts of the Council of London (1102), the Council of Troyes (1107), the Council of Rheims (1119), and others, we find that the decree of the Church against the marriage of priests, and even bishops, was far from being universally accepted. Indeed, we have specific reason for thinking that AbÉlard did not recognise an impediment of that character. In a work which bears the title Sententiae Abaelardi, we find the thesis, more or less clearly stated, that the priest may marry. The work is certainly not AbÉlard’s own composition, but the experts regard it as a careful summary of his views by some master of the period.

Apart from the laxer view of love-relation which AbÉlard probably shared, we can only find firm ground to interpret his reluctance to marry in the fear of injuring his further ambition. Marriage was fast becoming a fatal obstacle to advancement in the ecclesiastical world; a lover—with wealth—was not a serious difficulty. Even this point, however, cannot be pressed; it looks as though his ambition had become as limp and powerless as all other feelings in the new tyranny of love. Historians have been so eager to quarrel with the man that they have, perhaps, not paid a just regard to the fact that Heloise herself was violently opposed to marriage, and conscientiously thought their earlier union more honourable. This will appear presently.

Whatever struggle may have distracted AbÉlard after their separation, he was soon forced to take practical measures. Heloise found means to inform him—not with the conventional tears, but, he says, ‘with the keenest joy’—that she was about to become a mother. Fate had cut the ethical knot. He at once removed her from Fulbert’s house during the night, and had her conveyed, in the disguise of a nun,[17] to his home at Pallet. It is not clearly stated that AbÉlard accompanied her, but, beside the intrinsic probability, there is a local tradition that AbÉlard and Heloise spent many happy months together at Pallet, and there is a phrase in the ‘Story’ which seems to confirm it. However that may be, we find him in Paris again, after a time, seeking a reconciliation with Fulbert.

Fulbert was by no means the quiet, passive recluse that one would imagine from his earlier action, or inaction. The discovery of AbÉlard’s treachery and the removal of his niece had enkindled thoughts of wild and dark revenge. He feared, however, to attack AbÉlard whilst Heloise remained at Pallet; it is a fearful commentary on the times that AbÉlard should coolly remark that a retaliation on the part of his own relatives was apprehended. Revenge was considered a legitimate daughter of justice in those days. A compromise was at length imagined by AbÉlard. He proposed to marry Heloise, if Fulbert and his friends would agree to keep the marriage secret. In this we have a still clearer revelation of the one serious flaw in AbÉlard’s character—weakness. No doubt, if we had had an autobiography from an unmaimed AbÉlard—an AbÉlard who identified himself with, and endeavoured proudly to excuse, the lover of Heloise—we should be reminded of many extenuating elements; the repugnance of Heloise, the stupid anti-matrimonialism of the hierarchy, the current estimate of an unconsecrated liaison, and so forth. Even as it is, AbÉlard perceives no selfishness, no want of resolution, in his action. ‘Out of compassion for his great anxiety,’ he says, he approached Fulbert on the question of a private marriage. The canon consented, though secretly retaining his intention of taking a bloody revenge, AbÉlard thinks; and the master hastened once more to Brittany for his bride.

AbÉlard probably flattered himself that he had found an admirable outlet from his narrow circumstances. Fulbert’s conscience would be salved by the Church’s blessing on their love; the hierarchy would have no matrimonial impediment to oppose to his advancement; Paris would give an indulgent eye to what it would regard as an amiable frailty, if not a grace of character. Unfortunately for his peace, Heloise energetically repulsed the idea of marriage. The long passage in which AbÉlard gives us her objections is not the least interesting in the ‘Story.’

‘She asked,’ he writes, ‘what glory she would win from me, when she had rendered me inglorious, and had humbled both me and her. How great a punishment the world would inflict on her if she deprived it of so resplendent a light: what curses, what loss to the Church, what philosophic tears, would follow such a marriage. How outrageous, how pitiful it was, that he whom nature had created for the common blessing should be devoted to one woman, and plunged in so deep a disgrace. Profoundly did she hate the thought of a marriage which would prove so humiliating and so burdensome to me in every respect.’

Then follows an elaborate, rhetorical discourse on the disadvantages of matrimony, with careful division and subdivision, arguments from reason, from experience, from authority, and all the artifices of rhetoric and dialectics. That the learned Heloise did urge many of its curious points will scarcely be doubted, but as a careful and ordered piece of pleading against matrimony it has an obvious ulterior purpose. St. Paul is the first authority quoted; then follow St. Jerome, Theophrastus, and Cicero. She (or he) then draws an animated picture of the domestic felicity of a philosopher, reminding him of servants and cradles, infant music and the chatter of nurses, the pressing throng of the family and the helplessness of the little ones. The example of monks, of Nazarites, and of philosophers is impressively urged; and if he will not hesitate, as ‘a cleric and a canon,’ to commit himself ‘irrevocably to domestic joy,’ at least let him remember his dignity as a philosopher. The sad fate of the married Socrates is adduced, together with the thunder and rain incident. Finally, she is represented as saying that it is ‘sweeter to her and more honourable to him that she should be his mistress rather than his wife,’ and that she prefers to be united to him ‘by love alone, not by the compulsion of the marriage vow.’

When the letter containing this curious passage reached Heloise, nearly twenty years after the event, she, an abbess of high repute for holiness, admitted its correctness, with the exception that ‘a few arguments had been omitted in which she set love before matrimony and freedom before compulsion.’ Holy abbess writing to holy abbot, she calls God to witness that ‘if the name of wife is holier, the name of friend, or, if he likes, mistress or concubine, is sweeter,’ and that she ‘would rather be his mistress than the queen of a CÆsar.’ They who disregard these things in sitting in judgment on that famous liaison are foredoomed to error.

But AbÉlard prevailed. ‘Weeping and sobbing vehemently,’ he says, ‘she brought her discourse to an end with these words: “One thing alone remains for us now, we must exhibit in our common ruin a grief as strong as the love that has gone before.”’ It is an artistic termination to AbÉlard’s discourse, at all events.

Back to Paris once more, therefore, the two proceeded. Heloise had a strong foreboding of evil to come from the side of Fulbert; she did not trust his profession of conciliation. However, she left her boy, whom, with a curious affectation, they had called Astrolabe (the name of an astronomic apparatus), in the charge of AbÉlard’s sister Denyse. They were married a few days after their arrival at Paris. The vigil was spent, according to custom, in one of the churches: they remained all night in prayer, and the ceremony took place after an early Mass in the morning. Their arrival in Paris had been kept secret, and only Fulbert and a few friends of both parties were present at the marriage. Then they parted at the altar: the man weakly proceeding to follow his poor ambition in the school, the noble young wife making herself a sad sacrifice to his selfishness and irresolution.

During the next few dreary months they saw each other rarely and in secret. AbÉlard was a man of the type that waits for the compulsion of events in a serious conflict of desires, or of desire and duty. He could not lay aside his day-dream that somehow and some day the fates would smooth out a path along which he could carry both his whole ambition and his love. Events did decide for him once more. Fulbert, it seems, broke his faith with AbÉlard and divulged the marriage. But when people came to Heloise for confirmation, she did more than ‘lie with the sweetness of a Madonna,’ in Charles Reade’s approving phrase; she denied on oath that she was the wife of AbÉlard. Fulbert then began to ill-treat her (the circumstance may be commended to the notice of those historians who think he had acted from pure affection), and AbÉlard removed her secretly from her uncle’s house.

It was to the convent at Argenteuil that AbÉlard conveyed his wife this time. One passes almost the very spot in entering modern Paris by the western line, but the village lay at a much greater distance from the ancient island-city, a few miles beyond St. Denis, going down the river. It was a convent of Benedictine nuns, very familiar to Heloise, who had received her early education there. In order to conceal Heloise more effectually, he bade her put on the habit of the nuns, with the exception of the veil, which was the distinguishing mark of the professed religious. Here she remained for some months; AbÉlard waiting upon events, as usual, and occasionally making a secret visit to Argenteuil. According to Turlot, the abbess of Argenteuil was the mother of Heloise. We know, at least, that the nunnery was in a very lax condition, and that, beyond her unconquerable presentiment of evil, Heloise would suffer little restraint. Indeed, AbÉlard reminds her later, in his second letter to her, that their conjugal relations continued whilst she was in the nunnery.

How long this wretched situation continued it is impossible to determine. It cannot have been many months, at the most, before Fulbert discovered what had happened; it was probably a matter of weeks. Yet this is the only period in which it is possible to entertain the theory of AbÉlard’s licentiousness. We have already seen that Cotter Morison’s notion of a licentious period before the liaison with Heloise is quite indefensible. The tragic event which we have presently to relate puts the latest term to the possibility of such licence. Now, there are two documents on which AbÉlard’s critics rely: a letter to him from Fulques, prior in the monastery of Deuil near Paris, and a letter from his former teacher, Master Roscelin. Prior Fulques, however, merely says he ‘has heard’ that AbÉlard was reduced to poverty through ‘the greed and avarice of harlots’; and Roscelin explicitly states that he heard his story from the monks of St. Denis. Indeed, we may at once exclude Roscelin’s letter; not merely because it was written in a most furious outburst of temper, when a man would grasp any rumour, but also on the ground that his story is absurd and impossible. He represents AbÉlard, when a monk at St. Denis, later, returning to his monastery with the money earned by his teaching, and marching off with it to pay a former mistress. We shall see, in a later chapter, that AbÉlard did not begin to teach until he had left St. Denis.

If, however, Roscelin’s story is too absurd to entertain in itself, it is useful in casting some light on Fulques’s letter. Fulques was writing to AbÉlard on behalf of the monks of St. Denis. He would be well acquainted with their gossip, and would, therefore, probably be referring to the story which Roscelin shows to be impossible in giving it more fully. It is not unlikely that the story was really a perverse account of AbÉlard’s visits to Heloise at Argenteuil. In any case we are reduced to the gossip of a band of monks of notorious character (teste St. Bernard), of indirect and uncertain information, and of bitter hostility to AbÉlard.

And this is all the evidence which can be found in support of the calumny. On the strength of this monkish gossip we are asked to believe that AbÉlard grossly deceived his young wife, and made an attempt, as ridiculous (if the rumour contained truth) as it was hypocritical, to deceive the readers of his heart-naked confession. We are to suppose that ‘the abhorrence of harlots,’ of which he spoke earlier, entirely disappeared when he found himself united by the sacred bonds of both religion and love to a noble and devoted wife. We are to suppose that his apparent detestation and condemnation of his past conduct was a mere rhetorical artifice to conceal the foulest and most extraordinary episode in his career from the people amongst whom he had lived—an artifice, moreover, which would be utterly inconsistent with his life and character at the time he wrote the ‘Story.’ It is almost impossible to take such a notion seriously.

Once more, then, we are in a period of waiting for the direction of events. It came this time in tragic accents that for ever cured the unfortunate Breton of his listless trust in fate.

Fulbert learned at length that Heloise had been sent to Argenteuil, and had taken the habit. The canon at once inferred that this was a preliminary step to a dissolution of the marriage. He would be unaware that it had been consummated, and would suppose that AbÉlard intended to apply to Rome for a dispensation to relieve him of an apparent embarrassment. He decided on a fearful revenge, which should at least prevent AbÉlard from marrying another.

And one early morning, a little later, Paris was in a frenzy of excitement. Canons, students, and citizens, thronged the streets, and pressed towards AbÉlard’s house on St. Genevieve. ‘Almost the entire city,’ says Fulques, went clamouring towards his house: ‘women wept as though each one had lost her husband.’ AbÉlard had been brutally mutilated during the night. Hirelings of Canon Fulbert had corrupted his valet, and entered his room whilst he slept. They had perpetrated an indescribable outrage, such as was not infrequently inflicted in the quarrels of the Patareni and the NicolaitÆ. In that dark night the sunshine disappeared for ever from the life of Pierre AbÉlard. Henceforth we have to deal with a new man.

It is a pious theory of the autobiographist himself that this mutilation led indirectly to his ‘conversion.’ There is undoubtedly much truth in this notion of an indirect occasioning of better thoughts and of an indirect influence being cast on his mind for life. Yet we of the later date, holding a truer view of the unity of human nature, and of the place that sex-influence occupies in its life, can see that the ‘conversion’ was largely a direct, physical process. We have, in a very literal sense, another man to deal with henceforward.

As AbÉlard lay on the bed of sickness, the conversion gradually worked onwards towards a critical decision. It is not clear that the mutilation would prove of itself an impediment to scholastic honour or ecclesiastical office, but the old life could not be faced again by one with so little strength and so keen a sensibility. ‘I pondered on the glory I had won and on the swift chance blow that had obscured it, nay, wholly extinguished it: on the just judgment of God by which I had been punished in the member that had sinned: on the justice of treachery coming from him whom I had myself betrayed: on the joy of my rivals at such a humiliation: on the endless sorrow this wound would inflict on my family and my friends: on the speed with which this deep disgrace would travel through the world. What path was open to me now? How could I ever walk abroad again, to be pointed at by every finger, ridiculed by every tongue, a monstrous spectacle to all?... In such sorry plight as I was, the confusion of shame rather than a devout conversion impelled me to seek refuge in the monastery.’

To this natural ‘confusion of shame’ we must look for an explanation of, not merely the folly, but the cruelty and selfishness, of AbÉlard’s proposal. It involved the burial of Heloise in a nunnery. No one could shrink more feelingly from the unnatural shade of the cloister than did Heloise, as AbÉlard must have known, but in his pain and despair he forgot the elementary dictates of love or of honour. In any other circumstances the act would be deemed brutal. Indeed, he wantonly increased the suffering of his young wife by ordering her to take the vows first. Twenty years afterwards she plaintively tells him the sorrow he gave her by such a command. ‘God knows,’ she says, ‘I should not have hesitated, at your command, to precede or to follow you to hell itself.’ She was ‘profoundly grieved and ashamed’ at the distrust which seemed to be implied in his direction. But hers was the love that ‘is stronger than death,’ and she complied without a murmur, making of her sunny nature one more victim on the altar of masculine selfishness.

AbÉlard has left us a dramatic picture of her taking the vows. It shows clearly that the love which impelled her to such a sacrifice was not the blind, child-like affection that is wholly merged in the stronger loved one, but the deep, true love that sees the full extent of the sacrifice demanded, and accepts it with wide-opened eyes. At the last moment a little group of friends surrounded her in the convent-chapel. The veil, blessed by the bishop, lay on the altar before them, and they were endeavouring to dissuade her from going forward to take it. She waved them aside—waved aside for the last time the thought of her child and the vision of a sun-lit earth—and took the fateful step towards the altar. Then, standing on the spot where the young nun generally knelt for the final thanksgiving to God, she recited with the tense fervour of a human prayer the words of Cornelia in Lucan:

And, weeping and sobbing, she walked quickly up the steps of the altar, and covered herself with the veil of the religious profession.