Joseph McCabe

THE LETTERS OF ABÉLARD AND HELOISE

The true interest of the correspondence between the abbot husband and the abbess wife, which resulted from the publication of the ‘Story of my Calamities,’ needs to be pointed out afresh at the beginning of the twentieth century. It has been obscured through the eagerness of historians to indicate parallels and the tendency of poets and romancers to isolate features which appeal to them. During the eighteenth century the famous letters were made familiar to English readers by a number of translations from the French or from the original Latin. Even then there was a tendency to read them apart from the lives of the writers, or at least without an adequate preliminary study of their characters and their fortunes. Those translations are read no longer. Apart from the limited number of readers who have appreciated the excellent French versions of Madame Guizot and M. GrÉard, an idea is formed of the letters and their writers from a few ardent fragments, which are misleading in their isolation, and from the transference of the names ‘AbÉlard’ and ‘Heloise’ to more recent characters of history or romance. The letters must be read anew in the light of our augmented knowledge and of the juster psychological analysis which it has made possible.

There are those whose sole knowledge of Heloise is derived from the reading of Pope’s well-known poem, which is taken to be a metrical exposition of her first letter. With such an impression, and a few broad outlines of the life of the lovers, one is well prepared to accept the assertion of a parallel with the Portuguese Letters and other of the lettres amoureuses which were so dear to the eighteenth century. Probably few who compare Pope with the original, or indeed read him without comparison, will agree with Hallam that he has put ‘the sentiments of a coarse and abandoned woman into her mouth.’ Johnson found ‘no crudeness of sense, no asperity of language’ in Pope’s poem. Yet no one who has carefully read the original will fail to perceive that Pope has given a greatly distorted version of it. French versifiers found it ‘un amusement littÉraire et galant,’ as has been said of Bussy-Rabutin’s version, to isolate the element of passion in the finer soul of Heloise, and thus present her as a twelfth-century Marianne Alcoforado. Pope has yielded somewhat to the same spirit. He does indeed introduce the intellectual judgment and the complex ethical feeling of Heloise in his poem, but he alters the proportions of the psychic elements in her letter, and prepares the way for a false estimate. Pope’s Heloise is framed in the eighteenth century as naturally as the real Heloise is in the twelfth. Still, it must be remembered that Pope did not write from the original Latin letters. He evidently used some of the so-called ‘translations,’ but really paraphrases, of his time.[21]

The charge must also be laid, though with less insistence, against the parallels which some writers have discovered, or invented, for Heloise. The most famous are the Portuguese Letters, a series of singularly ardent love-letters from a Portuguese nun to a French noble. The correspondents are said to have been Marianne Alcoforado and M. de Chamilly—to look at whom, said St. Simon, you would never have thought him the soul of the Portuguese Letters. He was neither talented nor handsome, and his liaison with the nun seems to have been no more than the usual temporary incident in a soldier’s life. When he returned to France she wrote the letters which are so frequently associated with those of Heloise. It is an unworthy and a superficial comparison. There is a ground for comparison in the condition of the writer and in the free and vivid expression of a consuming love, but they are separated by profound differences. The Portuguese nun has nothing but her love; her life is being consumed in one flame of passion. Heloise is never so wholly lost in her passion; she can regard it objectively. Even were AbÉlard other than he was at the time, no one who knows Heloise could conceive her, after her vows, to say, ‘if it were possible for me to get out of this miserable cloister, I should not wait in Portugal for the fulfilment of your promise,’ or imagine her, under any conditions, to talk lightheartedly to her lover of ‘the languid pleasures your French mistresses give you,’ and remind him that he only sought in her ‘un plaisir grossier.’ There is not a word, in any of the Portuguese Letters, of God, of religious vows, of any thought or feeling above the plane of sense, of any appreciation of the literal sacrilege of her position, of anything but a wilful abandonment to a violent passion.

There are the same defects, though they are less obtrusive, in the parallel which Rousseau claimed in giving the title of the Nouvelle HeloÏse to his Savoyard letters. The accidental resemblance of the religious costume is wanting here, but, on the other hand, there is a greater show of character. Rousseau has confused the Heloise of 1117 and the abbess of the letters. From another point of view, one would like to know what Bussy-Rabutin or Colardeau would have thought of the Nouvelle HeloÏse as the expression of an absorbing passion. Rousseau, who held that the Portuguese Letters had been written by a man, was of the singular opinion that no woman could describe, or even feel, love. The letters of his Julie are pale fires beside the first and second letters of Heloise.[22]

In direct opposition to the writers who find parallels for the correspondence of abbess and abbot we have a few critics who deny or doubt the authenticity of the letters. It is significant that the recent and critical German biographers of AbÉlard do not even mention these doubts. They have, in truth, the slenderest of foundations. Lalanne, who has endeavoured to spread this heresy in faithful France, can say little more than that he cannot reconcile the tone of the letters with the age and condition of the writers; he also says that AbÉlard would be hardly likely to preserve such letters had he received them from his wife. Orelli has tried to sow similar doubts in the apparently more promising soil of German culture, but with no greater success. If it seems incredible that Heloise should have penned the letters which bear her name, how shall we qualify the supposition that there lived, some time within the following century, a genius capable of creating them, yet utterly unknown to his contemporaries? If they are the work of some admirer of AbÉlard, as Orelli thinks, they reveal a higher literary competency than Rousseau shows in his Nouvelle HeloÏse. We are asked to reject a wonder in the name of a greater wonder. Moreover, an admirer of AbÉlard would not have written the letters which bear his name in a style that has won for him anything but the admiration of posterity. And it is quite impossible to admit one series of the letters without the other.

Setting apart the letters of AbÉlard, which it is idle to question in themselves, it must be admitted that there are features in the letters of Heloise which are startling to the modern mind. These are the features on which her romantic admirers have concentrated; they will appear in due course. But when one evades the pressure of modern associations, and considers the correspondence in its twelfth-century setting, there is no inherent improbability in it. Rather the reverse. As to the publication of letters in which husband and wife had written the most sacred confidences, we need not suppose, as M. GrÉard does, that Heloise ever intended such a result, or built up her notes into letters for that purpose. Nothing compels us to think that they were brought together until years after the writers had been laid in a common tomb. There are obvious interpolations, it is true, but we shall only increase the difficulty—nay, we shall create a difficulty—if we look upon the most extraordinary passages in the letters as coming from any other source than the heart of an impassioned lover.

As regards what a logician would call the external difficulty—that we cannot trace the letters further back than the middle of the thirteenth century—it need not discompose us. The conditions which make a negative argument of that character valid are not present here. AbÉlard had been condemned and his party scattered. There are no writers to whom we should look for allusions to the letters before Guillaume de Lorris and Jehan le Meung manifestly introduce them in the Roman de la Rose. Indeed this circumstance, and the fact that the oldest manuscript we have dates from one hundred years after the death of Heloise, incline one to think that she wished the treasure to be preserved in a reverent privacy.

To give any large proportion of the letters here would be impossible, yet we must give such extracts from them as may serve in the task of reconstructing character. It was an age when the practice, if not the art, of letter-writing greatly flourished. St. Bernard’s letters form a portly and a remarkable volume. The chroniclers of the time have preserved an immense number of the Latin epistles which busy couriers bore over the land. One is prepared, therefore, to find much formality, much attention to the rules and the conventional graces of the epistolary art, even in the letters of Heloise. The strong, impetuous spirit does at times break forth, in splendid violence, from its self-imposed restraint, but we have, on the whole, something very unlike the utter and unthinking outpouring of an ebullient passion which is found in the letters of the Portuguese nun. Arguments are rounded with quotations from classic writers; dialectical forms are introduced here and there; a care for literary manner and construction of the Latin periods is manifested. Bayle says her Latin is ‘too frequently pedantic and subtile.’ It is, at all events, much superior to the average Latinity of the time, though, as in the case of AbÉlard, the characteristic defects of this are not entirely avoided.

Some day, then, after his ‘Story’ had gone forth on its peaceful mission into France, AbÉlard received a folded parchment in the once familiar hand.

‘To her lord, yea father: to her spouse, yea brother: from his servant, yea daughter—his wife, his sister: to AbÉlard from Heloise.’

So ran the superscription, a curious effort to breathe life into a formality of the day. Chance has brought to their abbey, she says, a copy of the letter he has recently sent forth. The story of his saddened life and of the dangers that yet multiply about him has affected them so deeply that they are filled with anxiety for him. ‘In hourly anguish do our trembling hearts and heaving breasts await the dread rumour of thy death. By Him who still extends to thee an uncertain protection we implore thee to inform us, His servants and thine, by frequent letter, of the course of the storms in which thou art still tossed; so that thou mayst let us at least, who have remained true to thee, share thy sorrow or thy joy. And if the storm shall have abated somewhat, so much the more speedily do thou send us an epistle which will bring so much joy to us.’ She invokes the authority of Seneca on the epistolary duties of friends, and she has a holier claim than that of friend, a stronger one than that of wife. ‘At thy command I would change, not merely my costume, but my very soul, so entirely art thou the sole possessor of my body and my spirit. Never, God is my witness, never have I sought anything in thee but thyself: I have sought thee, not thy gifts. I have not looked to the marriage bond or dowry: I have not even yearned to satisfy my own will and pleasure, but thine, as thou well knowest. The name of wife may be the holier and more approved, but the name of friend—nay, mistress or concubine, if thou wilt suffer it—has always been the sweeter to me. For in thus humbling myself for thee, I should win greater favour from thee, and do less injury to thy greatness. This thou hast thyself not wholly forgotten, in the aforesaid letter thou hast written for the consolation of a friend. Therein also thou hast related some of the arguments with which I essayed to turn thee from the thought of our unhappy wedlock, though thou hast omitted many in which I set forth the advantage of love over matrimony, freedom over bondage. God is my witness that if Augustus, the emperor of the whole world, were to honour me with the thought of wedlock, and yield me the empire of the universe, I should deem it more precious and more honourable to be thy mistress than to be the queen of a CÆsar.’

She claims no merit for her devotion. AbÉlard’s greatness more than justifies her seeming extravagance. ‘Who,’ she asks, going back to his golden age, ‘who did not hasten forth to look as thou didst walk abroad, or did not follow thee with outstretched neck and staring eyes? What wife, what maid, did not yearn for thee? What queen or noble dame was there who did not envy my fortune?’

Yet she would ask this measure of gratitude from him, that he write to her at times. He had never known refusal from her. ‘It was not religious fervour that drew me to the rigour of the conventual life, but thy command. How fruitlessly have I obeyed, if this gives me no title to thy gratitude!... When thou didst hasten to dedicate thyself to God I followed thee—nay, I went before thee. For, as if mindful of the looking back of Lot’s wife, thou didst devote me to God before thyself, by the sacred habit and vows of the monastery. Indeed it was in this sole circumstance that I had the sorrow and the shame of noting thy lack of confidence in me. God knows that I should not have hesitated a moment to go before or to follow thee to the very gates of hell, hadst thou commanded it. My soul was not my own but thine.’

Let him, therefore, make this small return of a letter to relieve her anxiety. ‘In earlier days, when thou didst seek worldly pleasure with me, thy letters were frequent enough; thy songs put the name of Heloise on every lip. Every street, every house in the city, echoed with my name. How juster would it be to lead me now to God than thou then didst to pleasure! Think then, I beseech thee, how much thou owest me. With this brief conclusion I terminate my long letter. Farewell, beloved.’

It is small wonder that the epistle placed AbÉlard in some perplexity. True, the devoted Heloise had spoken throughout in the past tense. But the ardour and the violence of her phrases betrayed a present depth of emotion which he must regard with some dismay. He had trusted that time and discipline would subdue the flame he had enkindled, and here it was indirectly revealed to live still in wondrous strength. He could not refuse to write, nor indeed would such a neglect profit anything; but he would send her a long letter of spiritual direction, and endeavour to divert her meditations.

‘To Heloise, his sister in Christ, from AbÉlard, her brother in Him,’ was the characteristic opening of his reply. If he has not written to her since her conversion, he says, it is not from neglect nor want of affection, but from the thought that she needed neither counsel nor consolation. She had been prioress at Argenteuil, the consoler and instructor of others. Yet, ‘if it seems otherwise to thy humility,’ he will certainly write her on any point she may suggest. She has spoken of prayer, and so he diverges into a long dissertation on the excellence of prayer, which fills nearly the whole of his pages. On one or two occasions only does he approach that colloquy of soul to soul, for which Heloise yearned so ardently. ‘We ourselves are united not only by the sanctity of our oath, but also by the identity of our religious profession. I will pass over your holy community, in which the prayers of so many virgins and widows ever mount up to God, and speak of thee thyself, whose holiness hath much favour with God, I doubt not, and remind thee what thou owest me, particularly in this grievous peril of mine. Do thou remember, then, in thy prayers him who is so specially thine own.’ And when at length he nears the end of his edifying treatise, he once more bares the heart that still beats within him. If, he says, they hear before long that he has fallen a victim to the plots of his enemies, or has by some other chance laid down his burden of sorrow, he trusts they will have his body brought to rest in their home, his own dear Paraclete, ‘for there is no safer and more blessed spot for the rest of a sorrowing soul.’

The long letter is, on the whole, prudent and formal to a degree. Yet it is not true that AbÉlard had nothing but coldness and prudence to return to his wife’s devotion. It is quite obvious what AbÉlard would conceive to be his duty in replying to Heloise. For her sake and for his, for her happiness and his repute, he must moderate the threatening fire. But that he had a true affection and sympathy for her is made clear by the occasional failure of his pious resolution. ‘Sister, who wert once dear to me in the world and art now most dear in Christ,’ he once exclaims parenthetically; and at other moments he calls her ‘dearest sister,’ and even ‘beloved.’ When we remember the gulf that now separated them, besides his obvious duty to guide her, we shall accept the contrast of their letters without using harsh words of the distracted abbot. But the pathos and the humanity of his closing paragraph defeated his purpose, and the whole soul of the abbess flames forth in her reply.

It opens with a calm and somewhat artificial quarrel with the superscription of his letter, but soon breaks out into strong reproach for his talk of death. ‘How hast thou been able to frame such thoughts, dearest?’ she asks; ‘how hast thou found words to convey them?’ ‘Spare me, beloved,’ she says again: ‘talk not of death until the dread angel comes near.’ Moreover, she and her nuns would be too distracted with grief to pray over his corpse. Seneca and Lucan are quoted to support her. Indeed she soon lapses into words which the theologian would call blasphemous. She turns her face to the heavens with that old, old cry, Where is Thy boasted justice? They were untouched in the days of their sinful joy, but smitten with a thousand sorrows as soon as their bed had the sacramental blessing. ‘Oh, if I dared but call God cruel to me! Oh, most wretched of all creatures that I am!’ Women have ever been the ruin of men—Adam, Solomon, Samson, Job—she runs through the long category of man’s sneaking accusations.

She wishes she could make satisfaction to God for her sin, but, ‘if I must confess the true infirmity of my wretched soul, how can I appease Him, when I am always accusing Him of the deepest cruelty for this affliction?’ There is yet a further depth that she must lay bare to her father confessor and her spouse. How can there be question of penance ‘when the mind still retains the thought of sinning, and is inflamed again with the old longing? So sweet did I find the pleasures of our loving days, that I cannot bring myself to reject them, nor banish them from my memory. Wheresoever I go they thrust themselves upon my vision, and enkindle the old desire. Even when I sleep they torment me with their fancied joy. Even during the Mass, when our prayer should be purest, the dreadful vision of those pleasures so haunts my soul that I am rather taken up with them than with prayer. I ought to be lamenting what I have done; I am rather lamenting what I miss. Not only our actions, but the places and the times are so bound up with the thought of thee in my mind, that night and day I am repeating all with thee in spirit. The movement of body reveals my thoughts at times; they are betrayed in unguarded speech. Oh, woe is me!... Not knowing my hypocrisy, people call me “chaste.” They deem bodily integrity a virtue, whereas virtue resides in the mind, not the body.’ Moreover, virtue should be practised out of love for God, whereas ‘God knows that in every part of my life I have more dread of offending thee than Him; I have a greater desire to please thee than Him.’ Let him not deceive himself with trust in her prayers, but rather help her to overcome herself. And the poor woman, the nobility of her soul hidden from her and crushed under the appalling ethical ignorance and perverse ordering of her times, ends with a plaintive hope that she may yet, in spite of all, find some corner in heaven that will save her from the abyss.

We have here the passages which have made Heloise an heroine in erotic circles for so many centuries. On these words, isolated from their context of religious horror and self-accusation, have Bussy-Rabutin, and Pope, and the rest, erected their gaudy structures; on them is grounded the parallel with Marianne Alcoforado, and Rousseau’s Julie, and so many other women who have meditated sin. Bayle has carried his Pyrrhonism so far as to doubt that ‘bodily integrity’ which she claims for herself with so little boasting; Chateaubriand, with broader and truer judgment, finds in the letter the mirroring of the soul of a good woman.

There can be little doubt that the optimism of Chateaubriand has for once come nearer to the truth than the cynicism of Bayle. The decadent admirers of Heloise forget three circumstances which should have diminished their equivocal adoration: the letter is from a wife to her husband, from a penitent to her spiritual guide—women say such things every day in the confessional, even in this very sensitive age—from a thoughtful woman to a man whom she knew to be dead to every breath of sensual love. There is no parallel to such a situation.

Further, it is now obvious that the romancists have done injustice to the soul of Heloise in their isolation of her impassioned phrases. She objectifies her love: she is not wholly merged in it. She never loses sight of its true position in her actual life. It is an evil, a temptation, a torment—she would be free from it. Yet she is too rational a thinker to turn to the easy theory of an outward tempter. It is part of herself, a true outgrowth of the nature God has given her; and between the voice of nature and the voice of conscience, complicated by the influence of conventual tradition and written law, her soul is rent with a terrific struggle. A modern confessor with a knowledge of physiology—there are a few such—could have led her into paths of peace without difficulty. There was no sin in her.

It is impossible to say that AbÉlard sails faultlessly through these troubled waters, but his answer to her on this point is true and sound in substance. ‘God grant that it be so in thy soul as thou hast written,’ he says in his next letter. It is true that he is chiefly regarding her humility, and that he does not shed the kindly light of human wisdom on her soul which an earlier AbÉlard would have done; yet we can imagine what St. Bernard or Robert d’Arbrissel would have answered to such an outpouring. However, apart from the happy moderation of this reply, AbÉlard’s third letter only increases our sympathy with this woman who wanders in the desert of the twelfth century of the Christian era. The wild cry of the suffering heart has startled him. He becomes painfully ingenious in defending Providence and the monastic or Buddhistic view of life. As to his death, why should she be moved so strongly? ‘If thou hadst any trust in the divine mercy towards me, the more grievous the afflictions of this life seem to thee the more wouldst thou desire to see me freed from them! Thou knowest of a certainty that whoever will deliver me from this life will deliver me from a heavy penalty. What I may incur hereafter I know not, but there is no uncertainty as to that which I escape.’ And again, when he comes to her accusations of Providence: if she would follow him to ‘the home of Vulcan,’ why cannot she follow him quietly to heaven? As to her saying that God spared them in their guilt and smote them in their wedded innocence, he denies the latter point. They were not innocent. Did they not have conjugal relations in the holy nunnery of the Virgin at Argenteuil?[23] Did he not profanely dress her in the habit of a nun when he took her secretly to Pallet? Flushed with the success of his apology for Providence, the unlucky abbot goes from bathos to bathos. There was not merely justice but love in the divine ruling. They had merited punishment, but had, ‘on the contrary,’ been rescued from the ‘vile and obscene pleasures’ of matrimony, from the ‘mud and mire,’ and so forth. His mutilation was a skilful operation on the part of Providence ‘to remove the root of all vice and sordidness from him, and make him fitter for the service of the altar.’ ‘I had deserved death, and I have received life. Do thou, then, unite with me in thanksgiving, my inseparable companion, who hast shared both my sin and my reward.’ How fortunate it was that they married! ‘For if thou hadst not been joined to me in matrimony, it might easily have happened that thou wouldst have remained in the world’—the one thing that would have saved her from utter desolation. ‘Oh, how dread a loss, how lamentable an evil it had been, if in the seeking of carnal pleasure thou hadst borne a few children in pain to the world, whereas thou now bearest so great a progeny with joy to heaven.’ Again the ‘mud and mire,’ and the thanksgiving. He even lends his pen, in his spiritual ecstasy, to the writing of this fearful calumny against himself: ‘Christ is thy true lover, not I; all that I sought in thee was the satisfaction of my miserable pleasure.’ Her passions are, like the artificially stimulated ones of the deacons in Gibbon and of Robert d’Arbrissel, a means of martyrdom. He had been spared all this, she had plaintively written; on the contrary, he urges, she will win more merit and reward than he.

I have given a full summary of the long epistle, because its psychological interest is great. We have seen the gradual transformation of AbÉlard—the steps in his ‘conversion’—from chapter to chapter. This letter marks the deepest stage of his lapse into Bernardism.[24] It offers an almost unprecedented contrast to the AbÉlard of 1115. And this is the man, I may be pardoned for repeating, who is held up by ecclesiastical writers (even such as Newman) to the blushes of the ages. Perhaps the age is not far off that will sincerely blush over him—not for his personal defects.

Heloise was silenced. Whether the pious dissertation had really influenced her, or the proud utterance of her plaint had relieved her, or she closed in upon her heart after such a reply, it would be difficult to say. Her next letter is calm, erudite, dialectical. ‘To her lord as to species, her beloved in person’ is the quaint heading of the epistle. She will try to keep her pen within due bounds in future, but he knows the saying about ‘the fulness of the heart.’ Nevertheless, ‘just as a nail is driven out by a new one, so it is with thoughts.’ He must help her to dwell on other things. She and her nuns beg him to write a new rule for them and a history of the monastic life. There are points in the Rule of St. Benedict which are peculiarly masculine; she discusses them in early mediÆval style. She would like her nuns to be permitted to eat meat and drink wine. There is less danger in giving wine to women; and she naÏvely quotes (from Macrobius) Aristotle’s crude speculation on the subject. Then follows a long dissertation on wine, temperance, and intemperance, bristling with proofs and weighty authorities. Briefly, she quarrels with the ascetic view of life. She happily avoids the hard sayings in which Christ urges it on every page of the Gospels, and voices the eternal compromise of human nature. Who may become AbÉlard’s successor as their spiritual guide, she does not know. Let him appoint a rule of life for them, which will guard them from unwise interference, and let it concede a little in the way of soft clothing, meat, wine, and other suspected commodities.

AbÉlard complies willingly, quite entering into the spirit of the nail theory. ‘I will make a brief and succinct reply to thy affectionate request, dear sister,’ he begins, at the head of a very long and very curious sketch of the history of monasticism. It is a brilliant proof of AbÉlard’s erudition, relatively to his opportunities, but at the same time an illustration of the power of constructing most adequate ‘explanations’ without any reference to the real agencies at work.

In a later letter AbÉlard drew up the rule of life which had been asked. It follows the usual principles and tendencies of such documents. It offers, however, no little psychological interest in connection with the modifications which the abbess has desired. The dialectician feels a logical reluctance to compromise, and the fervent monk cannot willingly write down half measures. Yet the human element in him has a sneaking sympathy with the plea of the abbess, and, with much explanation and a fond acceptance of Aristotelic theories, the compromise is effected. To the manuscript of this letter a later hand has added a smaller and more practical rule. This is generally attributed to Heloise herself, and is certainly the work of some early abbess of the Paraclete. It supplements AbÉlard’s scheme of principles and general directions by a table of regulations—as to beds, food, dress, visitors, scandals, etc.—of a more detailed character.

The closing letter of the famous series is one addressed by AbÉlard to ‘the virgins of the Paraclete’ on the subject of ‘the study of letters.’ It is from this epistle that we learn—as we do also from a letter of Venerable Peter of Cluny—of Heloise’s linguistic acquirements. The nuns are urged to undertake the study of the Scriptural tongues, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and are reminded that they have ‘a mother who is versed in these three languages.’ There is reason to think that neither master nor pupil knew much Greek or Hebrew.

This is followed shortly by a number of hymns and sermons. Heloise had asked him to write some hymns for liturgical use, so as to avoid a wearisome repetition and to dispense with some inappropriate ones. He sent ninety-three, but they are of little literary and poetic value. The source of his old-time poetic faculty is dried up. A sequence for the Feast of the Annunciation, which is attributed to him, won praise from, of all people, Luther. But the number of hymns and songs ‘attributed’ to AbÉlard is large. The sermons, of which thirty-four are to be found in the collection of his works, are not distinguished in their order. The abbot was not an eloquent preacher. But they are carefully written, erudite compositions, which were delivered at St. Gildas, or the Paraclete, or by special invitation. Some of them have much intrinsic interest or value—those on Susannah and John the Baptist, for instance, in connection with monastic affairs, and that on St. Peter in connection with his rigid loyalty to Rome.

A more interesting appendix to the correspondence is found in the forty-two ‘Problems of Heloise,’ with the replies of AbÉlard. Under the pretext of following out his direction, but probably with a greater anxiety to prolong the intercourse, Heloise sent to him a list of difficulties she had encountered in reading Scripture. The daughters of Charlemagne had responded to Alcuin’s exhortations with a similar list. The little treatise is not unworthy of analysis from the historico-theological point of view, but such a task cannot be undertaken here. The problems are, on the whole, those which have presented themselves to every thoughtful man and woman who has approached the Bible with the strictly orthodox view; the answers are, generally speaking, the theological artifices which served that purpose down to the middle of the wayward nineteenth century.

With this mild outbreak of rationalism Heloise passes out of the pages of history, save for a brief reintroduction in AbÉlard’s closing year. The interest and the force of her personality have been undoubtedly exaggerated by some of the chief biographers of AbÉlard, but she was assuredly an able, remarkable, and singularly graceful and interesting woman. Cousin once suddenly asked in the middle of a discourse: ‘Who is the woman whose love it would have been sweetest to have shared?’ Many names were suggested, though there must have been a strong anticipation that he would name Mme. de Longueville, for he laboured at that very time under his posthumous infatuation for the sister of CondÉ. But he answered, Heloise, ‘that noble creature who loved like a St. Theresa, wrote sometimes like Seneca, and who must have been irresistibly charming, since she charmed St. Bernard himself.’ It was a fine phrase to deliver impromptu, but an uncritical estimate. It is a characteristic paradox to say that she loved like a St. Theresa, and an exaggeration to say that she ever wrote like Seneca. As to her charming St. Bernard—the ‘pseudo-apostle,’ as she ungraciously calls him,—they who read the one brief letter he wrote her will have a new idea of a charmed man. Yet with her remarkable ability, her forceful and exalted character in the most devitalising circumstances, and her self-realisation, she would probably have written her name in the annals of France without the assistance of AbÉlard. It must be remembered that she had a very singular reputation, for her age, before she met AbÉlard. She might have been a St. Theresa to Peter of Cluny, or, as is more probable, a Montmorency in the political chronicle of France.