by Marion Meade
Ceci killed in a freakish accident. Jourdain, who had ridden off to the crusade with King Louis, killed by a Saracen arrow in the cucumber gardens outside Damascus. Astrolabe, whose lungs had fatally hemorrhaged the year after he became a canon at Nantes. Peter the Venerable gone too. Names drifting down the stream of time, beloved souls that touched hers and floated on, leaving her behind.
All at once, she thought of the letters, her black secrets hidden behind the wall of her chamber. Why had she not burned them, as she intended to do all along? She had never read them again, never even taken the box from its niche. Well, she thought. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now. They shall stay there until they crumble to dust; and she smiled.
Sister Claude's lips were moving, but Heloise could not hear the words above the roaring of her own breath. A column of mist closed upon her, and she felt herself being pulled, floating through a dark corridor. Somewhere behind her, she knew that women were weeping, but she didn't want to look back.
From a long way off drifted the sound of bells moaning, or perhaps it was only the wind. She came out of the blackness into a meadow, violently green. She had never known color to be so vivid.
Across the field, there was a stone wall, absurdly low. Not much use for keeping anyone out, she thought. Someone was sitting on the wall, and when he saw her, he grinned and stretched wide his arms. She rushed forward.
Note
While this is a work of fiction, I have followed the outlines of Heloise and Abelard's lives and used nothing but historical facts, when those facts are known. At certain periods, their lives are extremely well documented by their own writings: Abelard's Historia calamitatum (Story of His Misfortunes) provides valuable details about his early life, his relationship with Heloise, and the castration.
In addition to Abelard's autobiography, I have used as my chief source the eight letters exchanged by Heloise and Abelard. Extracts from this correspondence are quoted verbatim in the text. Certain unlikely incidents in the novel, such as their lovemaking in the refectory of Sainte-Marie of Argenteuil, are described in the letters. Heloise's letters in particular are memorable for their frankness, and even today they retain the power to shock. It is difficult to reconcile the pious abbess with these erotic outpourings. But it is not Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete, who is speaking; it is Heloise the woman. Not for another eight centuries would a woman write so openly of sexual feeling.
The personal letters, along with Abelard's letters outlining a Rule for the nuns, were kept by Heloise at the Paraclete during her lifetime. Unfortunately, the circumstances in which they were first made public are not known. It has been suggested that sometime in the late thirteenth century, more than a hundred years after Heloise's death, they were brought to Paris and copied. At present, there are nine known manuscripts of the letters, but no trace of the originals.
Aside from the surviving writings of Heloise and Abelard, I have made liberal use of the letters exchanged between Heloise and Peter the Venerable; the letters of Bernard of Clairvaux; and various twelfth-century chronicles, charters, and documents. All of these I have combed for details and woven into the narrative. For example, it is a fact that Astrane was the first prioress of the Paraclete, that Peter the Venerable illegally removed Abelard's corpse, that Heloise brought a lawsuit against the abbot of Vauluisant over the disputed oak forest, and so forth.
In the few biographies of Heloise. she is presented as either a classic case of the helpless young woman, seduced and abandoned, or as a self-sacrificing cardboard saint. In this novel, I have tried to portray her as I believe she must have been: a highly intelligent woman who struggled with the demands imposed on her sex by twelfth-century society. In one sense, she was very much a woman of her own time, and certainly it is impossible to understand many of her actions without taking into account the twelfth-century mind. In other and perhaps more important ways, however, she was an alien in her own century, and in that sense she speaks directly to our own. In an era when learning was limited to a select few (and most of them men), Heloise shines forth as the most brilliant woman of medieval times. Her contemporaries, never quick to admire female intelligence, nevertheless praised her as surpassing in erudition all women and—the highest acclaim—nearly all men. But in the twelfth century, her gifts could only be counted as an embarrassing superfluity. There was nothing she could do with them, and it is interesting to speculate on the probable course of her life had she not met Peter Abelard. In all likelihood, her uncle, despite his encouragement of her studies, would have eventually married her to some wealthy baron.
The tragedy of Heloise and Abelard was well known during their lifetime. It is mentioned in the chronicles of William Godel of Limoges and the English courtier, Walter Map. In the thirteenth century's Great Chronicle of Tours, a fanciful entry about Heloise recounts: "It is said that when she was lying in her last illness she gave instructions that when she was dead she should be laid in the tomb of her husband. And when her dead body was carried to the open tomb, her husband, who had died long before her, raised his arms to receive her, and so clasped her closely in his embrace."
The romantic historian disregards the fact that Heloise was not placed in Abelard's tomb. In the necrology of the Paraclete, it is recorded that she was buried alongside Abelard in the crypt of the abbey church. For three hundred years they rested undisturbed. Then, in 1497, Abbess Catherine de Courcelles had the bodies exhumed and moved to either side of the altar in a new church, which had been built farther back from the river. Between that year and 1780, the remains were relocated several times within the church.
At the time of the French Revolution, the Paraclete was sold, the nuns dispersed, and its buildings, apart from the residence of the abbess, destroyed. A few days before the sale, several citizens of Nogent-sur-Seine took the bones of Heloise and Abelard to the church of Saint-Laurent in Nogent. In 1800, the artist Alexandre Lenoir requested permission of the state to bury them in Paris, at his Musee des Monuments Francais. Lenoir acquired a sarcophagus from the monastery of Saint-Marcel, which he believed to be the one in which Abelard was first buried. Fifteen years later, the museum was closed and the bones moved to the cemetery of Mont Louis, now called Pere-Lachaise. There they remain today.
Enclosing their sarcophagus is an elegant Gothic-style structure, its canopy adorned with gargoyles and spires. Around it has been added an iron fence to deter visitors from cutting their names in the stone. Through the railing, flowers are still sometimes left by Parisians, tourists, and lovers of all nationalities.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1979 by Marion Meade
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-0222-9
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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