by Glenn Cooper
‘Like I said in my voice message. More of your manuscript. Hugo’s Belgian contact decoded another chunk.’
‘Did he say what the key word was?’
Isaak’s desk was in chaos, files and papers everywhere. He searched and cursed for a good minute before laying hands on the folder. ‘H ELOISE.’
‘Not a shock,’ Luc said. ‘It’s in Latin, no?’
‘It’s not a problem. I read Latin, Greek, even a bit of Hebrew and Aramaic. Hugo picked me for my background. He didn’t want a guy who only knew spreadsheets.’
‘Do you have time to translate it now?’
‘For a friend of Hugo’s, of course!’ He scratched his beard. ‘Also, I’m curious, and it’s more fun than sorting through accounts payable.’
Luc’s phone rang and he excused himself when he recognised the number.
‘Luc, it’s Father Menaud calling.’ There was a tremor in his voice.
‘Hello, Dom Menaud. Are you all right?’
‘It’s a silly thing to be upset about, what with the horrible tragedy of the murders but…’ His voice trailed off.
‘But what, Father?’
‘I’ve just found out the manuscript is gone! It was in the box on my desk. You recall it?’
‘Of course.’
‘I opened the box this morning to look at it and it wasn’t there! You don’t know anything about it, do you?’
‘No, nothing. When was the last time you saw it?’
‘Perhaps a week ago. Before the tragedy.’
‘Could someone have gone into your rooms and stolen it Sunday night?’
‘Yes. Nothing is locked here. I and the Brothers were at prayer when your people were attacked.’
‘I’m sorry, Father. I don’t know what to say. We have a very faithful colour copy of the manuscript, of course, but that’s no substitute. You should call Colonel Toucas and let him know. And listen – a little good news, I suppose. Another section has been decoded. I’ll send you the information when I have it.’
Luc re-pocketed his phone and saw that Isaak was staring at him.
‘On top of everything, Isaak, the Ruac Manuscript was stolen, perhaps the night of the murders. I’m not buying the randomness of all the shit that’s happened. Not for a minute. It’s more important than ever for us to know what the manuscript says. It has to be the key, so please, let’s go.’
Isaak had the lengthy email from Belgium printed out. He put on his reading glasses, and began translating the Latin, on the fly, apologising for his stumbles and wistfully interjecting that Hugo was the superior Latin scholar. It is a mystery to me how like-minded men, united in exaltation of Christ, could come to opposite conclusions about a shared experience. Whereas myself, Jean and Abelard were firmly of the belief the red infusion we prepared was a path to spiritual enlightenment and physical vigoir, Bernard was strongly opposed. Whereas we took to calling the liquid, Enlightenment Tea, Bernard declared it a Devil’s brew. Bernard’s rebuke was a great blow to us all, but none more so than Abelard who had come to love and respect my brother as deeply as if they were of the same flesh and blood. Bernard took his leave of Ruac and returned to Clairvaux when we three declared we would not forego the pleasures of the infusion. We would not, and indeed, felt we could not.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Priory of St Marcel, 1142
For a priory as modest as the one in St Marcel, it was an extraordinary gathering. Well set back from the River Saone and nestled in a dense thicket, the priory was ill equipped to deal with the influx of pilgrims. They arrived from all the compass-points of France, and how such a diverse population had efficiently learned about one man’s imminent death, no one could say for sure.
Abelard, the great teacher, philosopher and theologian lay dying.
There were students, disciples and admirers from all the way-stations of his life – Paris, Nogent-sur-Seine, Ruac, the Abbeys of Saint-Denis and St Gildas de Rhuys, the Paraclete in Ferreux-Quincey, and finally, this friendly final sanctuary near Cluny. He had spent his life teaching and wandering, thinking and writing and were it not for the dreaded white plague, the consumption that was eating away at his lungs, he would have continued to attract many more followers. Such was his charisma.
The infirmary was little more than a thatched hut and in the trodden-down clearing between the hut and the chapel, perhaps forty men had pitched camp to pray, to talk and to visit at his bedside in ones and twos.
The path from Ruac to St Marcel had been a twenty-four year exploration of life and love. Abelard had left Ruac, his health and outlook restored and had travelled to The Abbey of St Denis, where he had assumed the habit of a Benedictine monk, and had begun an explosively rich period of meditation and writing. Not only did he produce his controversial treatise on the Holy Trinity, much to the discomfort of the Church orthodoxy, but he also continued to write letter after letter, ever more passionate, to his beloved Heloise, still ensconced at the nunnery of Argenteuil.
He was nothing, if not feisty. His inquisitive temperament, rapier intelligence and boundless energy led him to argue and probe and shake established thought from its foundations. And whenever his spirits flagged or his pace slowed, he would set off with his wicker basket into the fields and meadows to collect plants and berries, much to the amusement of his fellow monks who knew not what he did with them.
He had his own personal trinity of sorts that occupied all his waking thoughts: theology, philosophy and Heloise. Of the first two, few men had the sufficiency of mind to spar with him or share his intellectual proclivities. Of the last, all men could understand his longings.
Heloise, sweet Heloise, remained the love of his life, the fiery beacon on a faraway hill that beckoned him home. But she had taken the veil and he had taken the cloth and Christ was their proper object of devotion. All they could do was exchange letters that singed each other with their passion.
Neither he nor Bernard of Clairvaux, would have ever imagined that Bernard’s new-found enmity of Abelard would have formed the bridge that would unite the star-crossed lovers.
When Bernard left Ruac, and returned to Citeaux healed in body but troubled in spirit, he bitterly rued the decision his brother Barthomieu had taken not to forsake the devil brew. On reflection, he blamed no one more than Abelard for the turn of events because among the players in this affair, none was more ample of mind and persuasive than that eunuch. His poor brother was a mere pawn. The true evil-doer was Abelard.
For that reason, he used his ever-widening sphere of ecclesiastical influence to keep tabs on that renegade monk and when Abelard’s treatise on the Trinity made it into his hands, he seized on its heresies, as he saw them, to have him summoned before a papal council at Soissons in 1121 to answer for himself.
Was he not proclaiming a Tritheistic view that Father, Son and Holy Ghost were separable, each with their own existence, Bernard fumed? Was the One God merely an abstraction to him? Had the devil brew made him lose his mind?
With no little satisfaction, Bernard learned that Abelard had been forced by the Pope to burn his own book and retreat to St Denis in disgrace. But bitter seeds had been sown. The monks at the abbey saw fit to rid themselves of Abelard and his heresy and he withdrew to the solitude of a deserted place in the vicinity of Troyes, in a hamlet known as Ferreux-Quincey. There, he and a small band of followers established a new monastery they called the Oratory of the Paraclete. Paraclete – the Holy Ghost. A stick-in-the-eye to his accusers.
The place suited Abelard. It was remote, it had a good spring nearby, fertile soil and an ample source of wood for building a church. And, to his satisfaction there was an abundance of possession weed, barley grasses and gooseberries in the environs.
When the basics of the oratory were constructed and there was a chapel and lodgings, he did something he could not have done had he not been the abbot of this new place: he summoned Heloise.
She came from Argenteuil on a horse-drawn cart, accompanied by a small entourage o
f nuns.
Though veiled in the simple habit of a sister, she was as captivating as he had remembered.
Surrounded by their followers, they could not embrace. A touch of hands, that was all. That was enough.
He noticed her crucifix was larger than her companions’. ‘You are a prioress, now,’ he observed.
‘And you are an abbot, sir,’ she countered.
‘We have risen to high office,’ he jested.
‘The better to serve Christ,’ she said, lowering her eyes.
He came to her at night in the little house he had built. She protested. They argued. He was wild-eyed, talking too fast in a dreamy way, cogent but fluid without the starts and pauses of normal discourse. He had drunk his Enlightenment Tea earlier in the evening. She did not need to know that. He was pressed for time. His mood would curdle soon enough and he did not want her to bear witness.
Her wit and tongue were rapier-sharp, as ever. Her skin was as white as the finest marble in her uncle Fulbert’s salon. Too little of it showed from under her chaste rough habit. He pushed her down on her bed and fell onto her, kissing her neck, her cheeks. She pushed back and chided but then yielded and kissed him too. He pulled at the coarse fabric that covered her to her ankles and exposed the flesh of her thigh.
‘We cannot,’ she moaned.
‘We are husband and wife,’ he panted.
‘No longer.’
‘Still.’
‘ You cannot,’ she said, and then she felt his hardness against her leg. ‘How is this possible?’ she gasped. ‘Your mishap?’
‘I told you there was a way for us to be man and wife again,’ he said, and he lifted her habit high over her waist.
Hypocrisy.
It weighed on them. She was married to Christ. He had taken the vows of a monk and those vows included chastity. Both of them had towering intellects and full knowledge of the religious, ethical and moral consequences of their actions. Yet, they could not stop.
After Matins, several times a week, Abelard would retire to his abbot house, drink a draught of Enlightenment Tea, and in the middle of the night come to her. Some nights she said no, initially. Some nights she spoke not a word. But every time he came, she would consent and they would lie together as man and wife. And every time, when they were done, he left her in a hail of self-deprecation and tears. And he too, when he was alone, would pray fervently for the absolution of his sins.
Their liaisons could have continued without interference. He was a eunuch. This was universally known. Their relationship, was by this twist of fate, beyond suspicion or reproach.
Yet it could not stand. In the end, Christ was stronger than their lust. Their guilt tore them to pieces and threatened their sanity. Their stealthy practice ground them down. She said she felt like a thief in the night and he could not disagree. He always insisted on leaving her after they made love and warned her of a dark side that had him in its grip, which he would not let her witness. And then he would run off into the woods before the rage overtook him. There, until the cloud passed, he would flail the trees with branches and pound the earth with his fists until the pain made him stop.
Their continual cycles of sin and repentance made them into oxen yoked to a grist mill, turning, turning, going nowhere. Did they not, they asked each other when they were spent from lovemaking, have higher purposes?
In time, despite his overwhelming desire and affection, he bade her to return to Argenteuil and she fitfully agreed.
They continued to write each other, dozens of letters, pouring their souls on to parchment. None affected Abelard more than this missive, which he reread every day for the rest of his life: You desire me to give myself up to my duty, and to be wholly God’s, to whom I am consecrated. How can I do that, when you frighten me with apprehensions that continually possess my mind both night and day? When an evil threatens us, and it is impossible to ward it off, why do we give up ourselves to the unprofitable fear of it, which is yet even more tormenting than the evil itself? What have I hope for after the loss of you? What can confine me to earth when death shall have taken away from me all that was dear on it? I have renounced without difficulty all the charms of life, preserving only my love, and the secret pleasure of thinking incessantly of you, and hearing that you live. And yet, alas! you do not live for me, and dare not flatter myself even with the hope that I shall ever see you again. This is the greatest of my afflictions. Heaven commands me to renounce my fatal passion for you, but oh! my heart will never be able to consent to it. Adieu.
In her absence, Abelard threw himself back into a world of writing, teaching and fervent prayer. He was always a magnet for students who possessed the finest minds, and they found him at Paraclete.
But Bernard, now entrenched in the role of nemesis, found him too, or at least found his new writings. For several years, he taught and wrote but once again, Abelard’s views on the Trinity set him on a collision course with orthodoxy and by 1125, bowing to Bernard’s remote but powerful hand, his position at Paraclete became untenable.
Abelard summoned Heloise one more time to Paraclete, assuring her there was important business, not passion on his mind. This was a half-truth, for his passion had never ebbed.
He told her he had been offered a position as head of the monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, and he had accepted it. Yes, Brittany was far away, but he could make a fresh start, further from the sphere of influence of his adversaries. He had much to write and still much to learn and his energy and ambitions had never been greater. And he could visit with their child, Astrolabe, who had since birth lived in Brittany with Heloise’s sister.
And this he saved for last. He placed both hands on her shoulders in a manner both tender and authoritarian and bestowed on her the title of Abbess of the Oratory of Paraclete. The monastery was hers now. He would return to Paraclete only in death.
She wept.
Tears of sorrow for their lost love, for her daughter who did not know her mother.
But also tears of joy for Abelard’s miraculous triumph over her uncle’s cruel hand and his indomitable spirit and vigour.
Her nuns were summoned from Argenteuil to join her in this new place. Abelard’s brothers would vacate so Paraclete could be a community of women.
In a mass in the church, he formally consecrated her as abbess and passed on to her a copy of the monastic rule and the baculum, her pastoral staff, which she firmly grasped, looking deeply into his eyes.
And later, when he rode off to the west, never, he supposed, to see her again, she staunched her tears and serenely walked to the chapel where her nuns were waiting for her to preside over Vespers for the very first time.
Abelard’s time in Brittany proved short. He directed his sadness and frustrations into an autocratic style and before long had so alienated his new flock, who had expected him to be a lax master. He wrote furiously, prayed with anger in his eyes, cruelly cut the monks’ rations and worked them like beasts of burden. His only release was his episodic use of Enlightenment Tea to take him away from his torments and replenish his zeal. But once again, he saw it was time to move on when his brethren at Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys expressed their displeasure with his autocracy by trying to poison him.
Thus began the last chapter in his life, fifteen peripatetic years which saw him at Nantes, Mount St Genevieve, and back to Paris, where he accumulated students the way a squirrel accumulates acorns. And everywhere he went, he made sure he had a good supply of his precious plants and berries – not a week went by without an indulgence.
By twisted fate, unable to live in matrimonial bliss with his one true love, he felt he had little to lose by freely expressing his views. In tract after tract, book after book, he vented against the traditions of the church with his mighty intelligence and each publication eventually made its way to the desk of Bernard who had bit by bit become a theologian second in influence only to the Pope.
In Sic et Non, Abelard almost made parody of orthodox leadership
and made it seem that the fathers of the Church could not express themselves clearly. Bernard gritted his teeth but the work was not, in and of itself, actionable. Finally, Abelard crossed the line, as far as Bernard was concerned. He believed that the eunuch’s Expositio in Epistolam ad Romanos, spat at the feet of the Church by seeming to deny the very foundation of the Atonement. Had not Christ died on the cross as payment for the sins of man by dying in their place? Well, not to Abelard! He maintained that Christ died to win men’s hearts by the example of reconciling love.
Love! This was too much.
Bernard threw the full measure of his weight to the task of crushing Abelard once and for all. The time for private warnings was over and Bernard took the matter to the Bishops of France. Abelard was summoned to the Council of Sens in 1141 to plead his case. He reckoned he would have the ability to meet his accuser openly, to debate his old friend and spar with him the way they had done during their convalescence at Ruac.
When Abelard arrived at Sens, he learned, to his horror, that the evening before, Bernard had met privately with the bishops and a condemnation had already been meted out. There would be no public debate, nothing of the kind, but the Council agreed to let Abelard have his freedom for the express purpose of making a direct appeal to Rome.
He never made it that far.
Bernard saw to it that Pope Innocent II confirmed the sentence of the Council of Sens before Abelard made it out of France, not that it would have mattered, because a few months earlier, one of Abelard’s students had coughed in his face, and had seeded his lungs with consumption.
Scant weeks after Sens he became ill. First came fever and night sweats. Then an irritated cough which progressed to paroxysms. The green flux from his lungs went from pink-tinged to streaky-red to gushes of crimson. His appetite dried up like a spent well. His weight fell.
He even lost desire for his red tea.
An old colleague and benefactor, the venerable Pierre, Abbot of Cluny, intervened when Abelard passed through his gates, as he persevered in his struggle to venture to Rome for an audience with the Holy Father.