by George Moore
We shall always remember Étampes, Abélard said, laying his hand on Héloïse. Hark! some gleemen are singing in the street, and he asked Héloïse if she remembered the gleemen in the rue des Chantres. Do I remember! she answered. And they descended the long stairs to listen to the love song the gleemen were singing to a lute accompaniment; but on perceiving the religious they stopped singing the song, thinking it unseemly for a friar or nun to hear it in public, and began an Ave Maria:
Qui de same
Veut oster le fiel amer,
Nostre Dame
Jor et nuit doit reclamer.
Foie amor pour lui amer
Jetons fuer:
Qui ne l’aime de douz cuer
Bien se puet chétif clamer.
Porte du ciel,
De Paradis planche et ponz,
Sorse de miel,
De douceur pecine et fonz
D’enfer qui tant est parfonz
Nous deffent.
Qui non crient peu a de sens
Car n’i a rive ne fonz.
Douce dame,
Par mult vraie entencion
Cors et ame
Met en ta protection.
Prie sanz dilation
Ton fil douz,
Qu’il nous face vivre touz
In terra viventium.
The words are better than the tune, gleemen, Abélard said. I will write you another to-night which perchance will be worthier of the words than the one you sing to it; and hoping that he would be inspired, the gleemen thanked him, but he noticed that they did not begin to sing at once. They are waiting, Madelon said, till the friar and the nuns are out of hearing before they commence a song more welcome to their customers. It may be so, Abélard answered indifferently, for his thoughts were on some quiet spot in the forest where he might be alone with Héloïse. But the forest seemed full of voices, voices came from every side, and, seeking to escape from the townspeople out for an evening stroll, the lovers struggled from one sandy hollow into another, through tall pines rising out of the sand. Lovers would be here keeping trysts, said Abélard, if the town were not amusing itself awaking forest echoes. You’ll not miss my company, said Madelon; my tongue has clattered in your ears since early morning, so I will leave you to your own thinkings. Do not go too far, Abélard replied, for we cannot return to the inn alone without raising suspicion against ourselves. I shall sit in the vale beyond and tell my beads, as is my wont before going to bed. But sleep not, said Abélard, for the darkness is so deep that we might not be able to find thee. I shall not sleep, she answered, and Héloïse drew closer to Abélard. All this afternoon I have been thinking of thee, she said.
Abélard answered: is it strange that thou shouldst think of me? We think of each other always, she replied, but there are moments when each longs for the other more intensely than at other moments. If desire were without ebb and flow, we should not be able to bear the strain, Abélard answered. Abélard, I would speak plainly with thee. It was not for kisses then that we came here? he asked, and she answered: thy kisses and thine embraces I would not be without, nor could be without. Abélard, do not kiss me, for I would speak to thee of thyself and I would speak of myself. If we were caught and taken back to Paris! Think not of Fulbert, think only of me, Abélard answered. Madelon watches for us, but she prays for herself, telling her beads, and will fall asleep over them.
Héloïse forgot to answer her lover, and in the silence of the pines they lay in each other’s arms, happy in each other’s atmosphere, afraid to speak, for a word would break the spell of their delight. It was for moments like these that we met, Héloïse said at last; it is for our love that we live, but it’s only now that I begin to know love, for in the beginning, Abélard, I was not true to thee nor to myself. It was not thy manhood that I loved, but thy genius. Thy genius exalted me, compelled me to throw myself at thy feet, but that was not love but vanity. Abélard, I would tell thee all things. I would have thee know me as God knows me; but words are vain, and oneself is a burden to oneself. I would have thee, Abélard, love me as I love thee: I would have thee love the woman that I am. Ah, I know it is the woman in me that thou lovest, but in the beginning it was the learned girl of whom Paris was talking that drew thee to me, and I was proud of my learning and grateful to it for having gained thee to me. But now I would cast the learned girl out of myself and I would cast the philosopher out of thee, leaving naught but the woman and the man for each to love the other through eternity. We meet in this vale at night for love, but methinks that we must have met long, long ago in the ages back, perhaps before the beginning of time. This moment is but a moment in a love story without beginning and without end. It may seem to thee that I am talking only as the mad talk. But I am not talking, Abélard, I am thinking; I am not thinking, Abélard, I am dreaming; I am not dreaming, Abélard, I am feeling; and in this moment I am consonant with the tree above me and the stars above the tree; I am amid the roots of the hills. It may be, Abélard, that I am a little mad at this moment, but we are all too sane, and whosoever has not passed from sanity to insanity has perhaps never tasted the final essence, the residue of things. I would, too, that thou wert a little mad here in this vale, the dark trees above us, the stars shining through the tree-tops. And Madelon, Abélard answered, saying her beads in the vale. Thou wouldst strike a jarring note, for alas, we are divided, Héloïse answered sadly, and I am sorry that thou canst not love as I do. So already, Héloïse, even in this moment thou hast a fault to find. No, I find no fault, but I would have thee tell me why I was sent to thee, for hast thou not often traced the hand of God in our meeting? There is a reason for all things, though we cannot trace it, Abélard replied, and I might ask thee: why was I saved from love of woman till I met thee in the cathedral? Words fail us, Abélard, and truth eludes us. Am I the true lover, or is it thou? Canst thou answer, or is it that time alone holds the answer? We are divided again, we who have been united. We are not divided, Héloïse; we shall never be divided. We have existed always, united in the end as we were in the beginning, and it cannot be said that we shall be parted come what may.
It is as thou speakest it that I feel my love, she said, as a thing that always was and ever shall be. That our love, he answered, was before the beginning of time is my belief, and I believe, too, that it shall not end with time. Then I have heard what I wished to hear, Abélard, for it has always seemed to me that our love came to us from the stars, and since our love awakened almost the same thought in thee thou wilt be spared, as I shall be, the shame of regret. Regret nothing, Abélard, for I swear thy love of me shall not steal a single jewel from thy crown of glory. How came I into this knowledge? It was revealed to me as my love was revealed to me, as thy love was revealed to thee, as all things are revealed. And now I have told thee all. Our love shall not cost thee a single jewel, not one, she repeated, rising to her feet, and they stood, looking at each other, Abélard marvelling at the beauty of her eyes; and remembering that he had seen them wistful and far away, he wondered at seeing them open and confident. My love is dearer — Our love, Héloïse interrupted, is part of thy renown; it is our business to protect it, for without it we perish, that is what was upon my mind to tell; now we must go in search of Madelon. And they went from vale to vale calling; at last a sudden ray of moonlight discovered her asleep. Madelon, hast thou no ears for the nightingales? A thousand are singing about thee. She roused a little, and, moaning for her bed, followed them to the inn. Begin telling thy beads, Héloïse, for it will make a good appearance. Begin telling thy beads, Madelon, and myself will make show with my breviary.
And in their different beds all three slept till the prime of the morning was over, and the hope of reaching a certain village by evening was almost gone. But morning and evening the forest is safe for the religious, so said the innkeeper. The robbers that infested it would not dare to attack them, he averred, and he knew the ways of the forest robbers, having had himself on more times than one to pay blackmail to save his house fro
m plunder and his guests from being carried off and held to ransom. But the religious have no cause to fear, so severely were the robbers punished on different occasions for robbing them, so cruel were the punishments inflicted upon them when caught, and so rigorous was the search made for them after every robbery or murder committed. A friar like yourself, reverend sir, was murdered and robbed on a lonely bit of the road between here and Saint-Jean-de-Braie, a large village or town within the skirts of the forest, two leagues, two and a half, maybe, from Orléans. The robber fled, but the religious have power with the King, and a price was put on his head, and money, as you will know, reverend sir, produces every virtue as well as every vice. The robber was betrayed at last, and as he had been a terror in the district for some time, a curious death was devised for him, one that would bring the people far and wide to see; and they came in thick crowds, for the robber was to be laid at length on the floor of the scaffold to have his belly eaten out by a dog trained for the job. The condemned was told what his punishment was to be, and he must have suffered in thought as much as he did upon the scaffold. The agony his eyes bespoke when he saw the dog straining at the chain will never be forgotten by those who saw it. He was shriven by a friar of the Order of the man he had killed, and allowed to kiss the Cross before the dog was let loose upon him, an animal well trained, who in less than ten minutes was pulling out the entrails, casting them to and fro while the man was yet alive. A cruel punishment, full of sickening forebodings before the moment came, but not worse, I ween, than the punishment inflicted upon him who stole the sacred vessels from the cathedral in Orleans, for I was there at the time and can tell that the flaying was skilfully performed, the skin of the robber’s leg being withdrawn from the flesh even as a stocking might be. He screamed terribly and begged to be killed outright, but this could not be, for his punishment included the lifting of the skin from his belly, and my word! it was thrown over his face like an apron. The water test is maybe as fierce a suffering as any, so the executioner himself told me, for pouring pints and quarts and gallons into a man until his guts are distended like bladders tends to suffocation, and the drying of him in a warm room is not less an infliction than the pouring. It is in the warmest room, it appears, that his will yields, and the heresy that he cherishes is foregone and denied. So it was upon a heretic that the water test was practised — and Abelard asked what his terrible heresy might have been. One of the Pastorals, for certain, but his name has passed my mind, answered the innkeeper; a rebel against his Lord and Master, and a believer that the reign of the Father and the Son was over and that of the Ghost had begun. A terrible belief to hold indeed, Abélard replied, and did he die in this belief? Troth and faith he did, reverend sir, though it was held as truth at the time that if he had taken a little less water, or if the drying had been less quickly done, he would have repented and died shriven and received into the Church again. But if there are no robbers to fear, Abélard asked, in the forests, thanks to the condign measures thou hast described so well, innkeeper, there are wolves? The wolves, reverend sir, feed so well at this season of the year upon young deer and fawns, picking up the young of the wild swine occasionally, that the traveller goes his way unafraid. Of what are you talking, brother Pierre? Héloïse asked. Of wolves, Abélard answered, whereupon she related the story of the wolf which she had not succoured in the great wolf-hunt, though he howled plaintively at her door for it to be opened. Yet we are venturing into a forest filled with wolves, she said. Abélard whispered in her ear: the two-legged wolves are more fearsome than the four; let us away. Whereupon he helped his nuns into their pillions and they started forth on the next stage of their journey, hoping to reach before sundown the village of Chécy.
But to reach Chécy before nightfall they would have to hasten, and the innkeeper told them that the road through the forest looped so that the village of Lorris might be taken into the circuit; but there was no need for him to follow this winding, he would find a by-path across certain low hills which he could not miss. Abélard did not feel sure that the by-path might not be missed, but to hear the road explained out again would be merely a waste of time, and so they hastened towards the forest in a sort of half-knowledge of the way, allowing the horses to trot a little, thinking that they might draw rein when they passed through the fringe of birch-trees that encircled with their pallor the great district of pines that showed in black masses over against Étampes. Now we are well within the forest, Abélard said, as much in the forest as if we were in the middle of it; and he asked Héloïse to peep over the undergrowth that lined the rutted path down which they were riding, so that she might see the pines rising up naked and bare some fifty or sixty feet, some straight, some leaning, in endless aisles. Like the spears, Héloïse said, of Crusaders going into battle; and how penetrating is the smell of the resin. But the pines were in patches only, and the forest passed quickly into rocky hillsides overgrown with oak and beech; and so faint was the path they followed that Abélard often asked Héloïse and Madelon to draw rein while he went forward in search of the path, for if we all went forward together, he said, we should not be able to go back to where the path ends: a tree is no sure landmark; one forgets which tree, and wanders in a circle. I’ve got it, he cried to them, and they came forward, the forest getting lonelier as they proceeded into it.
All bird cries have ceased, and we hear only the sighing of the boughs, Héloïse said, and the smell of the forest is different from all other smells; a more mysterious smell is about, a smell of earth and moss. There is also a warm smell, said Madelon, that reminds me of our Brittany forests, the great forest about Clisson, where we shall be — Héloïse, myself and my boy — before the month’s end, should we catch a fast-sailing barge from Orléans. Did he not say a bit over three leagues from Étampes we should find the by-path that would save us several leagues’ journey? Abélard asked, and some hundreds of feet after he told them to rein in while he went on ahead in search of the path. Here it is, he cried, from a clearing; we have but to follow the path that leads through the hollows yonder up to the rising ground that the innkeeper spoke of. He spoke to me of oak-trees, and here they are. And they rode beneath the boughs not yet in full leaf, following the path as it wound through hollows, losing it and finding it amid rocks, pushing their way through thickets that seemed impenetrable at a distance but did not prove so hard to force through as they had appeared. There is a rutted way under the brambles, Abélard said; cattle and horses have been through here; and stooping low in their saddles, they broke through somehow, losing bits of clothing in the passage. Soon after the path led them up hills, through thorn and hazel mingled with interspaces, till it brought them to a heath, and Abélard said: those pines standing so solitary at the end of the lake embedded in rocks are the trees that the innkeeper told me I was to look out for. We have not missed the way, he continued; look back and see the forest that we have come through. And he pointed to a dark ragged line of pines flowing down the northern sky. But is our way to the right or to the left? Madelon asked. To the left, he answered; we have to ride southward, keeping the setting sun on our right.
Once more they plunged into the forest, and this time it was all birch, and while wandering they learnt some facts regarding this tree from Madelon, who told them that in Brittany, in the wilder parts, birch bark was used by the peasants to thatch their cottages. But this was not all. The birch possessed many qualities which Madelon was willing to tell, but her loquacity was interrupted by the spectacle of many uprooted trees. The great storm of some three years ago, she said, has laid them low, turning their roots up into the air, leaving great holes behind. A sad sight it was truly, all these dead trees, dead or dying, for some, though their roots were broken, were coming into leaf; the last leaves they will bear, Abélard said; next spring they will be lying leafless. The travellers were sorry for the poor trees, and wondered how it was that a clump remained here and there unharmed; sometimes it was a single tree that had managed to keep its roots unbroken.
The wind seems to have whirled about the forest at random, Abélard said; leaving some spots untouched, tearing the slender rooted birches as if they were reeds, unearthing the great elms and sparing only the oaks. The oak, said Madelon, is rarely uprooted, for its roots go deeper than any other tree; some say its roots go as deep as its branches go high. Fine trees, she said, are those about us, almost as great as the oaks of Clisson, over against the castle of Clisson. You know it well, master philosopher; I needn’t tell you the distance between Clisson and Le Pallet; you know it better than I do. And you know, too, that in our country it is said (and who should know the value of the oak better than the Breton?) that no tree is as useful to man and to beast as the oak. Many a good meal myself, my father and kindred have made out of the oak mast. The oxen rejoice and eat the oak mast greedily and fatten on it, and the pigs rejoice in it even more than the oxen. In the forest of Clisson, as master Abélard knows well, Héloïse, every farmer garners as much as two hundred and forty bushels of acorns for the oxen, mingling them with a like quantity of beans and lupins and drenching them well. For the building of ships and the making of houses there is no timber like the oak. A man with an oak rafter over his head is always sure of his roof. The oak is a good tree from end to end; there’s nothing about the oak that man can’t put to his use and benefit. The leaves of the oak make the best litter for cattle, and one of the Crusaders, who had been as far as Hungary and come back, tells a tale of a certain water which transmutes the leaves of this tree into brass, iron and copper; and in Brittany the leaves decocted in wine make an excellent gargle for a sore throat. Even the shade of the oak is good to man. If he has walked a long distance and is hot, no doubt he rests well, Abélard said. There’s more in the shade of the oak than that, replied Madelon; many a paralytic has sat down in the shade of an oak with his crutches laid against the tree, and if he sleeps long enough in the shade, he will rise up and walk, leaving his crutches behind for sign of his cure, and that others may do as he did.