“Temps s’en va,
Et rien n’ai fait” . . .
Abelard raised his head. It was a pleasant voice, though a little drunken, and the words came clearly enough, a trifle blurred about the consonants, to the high window of the Maison du Poirier. The window was open, for the June night was hot, and there were few noises after ten o’clock in the Place du Parvis Notre Dame.
“Time goes by,
And naught do I.
Time comes again,
. . . Et ne fais rien!”
Abelard’s smile broadened. “I am very sure, my friend,” said he, “that you do not.” But at any rate he had found a good tune. The listener’s ear was quick. He began noting it on the margin of his manuscript, while his brain busied itself fitting Latin words to the original: a pity to waste so good a tune and so profound a sentiment on a language that was the breath of a day.
“Fugit hora,
Absque mora,
Nihil facio” . . .
Not to that tune. The insinuating, if doomed, vernacular lilted again. Abelard realised that he was spoiling the margin of his Commentary on Ezekiel, and turned back resolutely.
“Now, as Augustine says, our concern with any man is not with what eloquence he teaches, but with what evidence.” But the thread of his argument was broken: he got up and came over to the window. The singing had stopped, but he could see the tonsured head below him, glimmering like a mushroom in the dusk, while the legs tacked uncertainly across the broad pavement of the Parvis Notre Dame on their way to the cheerful squalors of the Petit Pont. Suddenly they halted: the moon had come out from a drifting haze, and the singer, pausing on the edge of a pool of light, peered at it anxiously, and then lifted up his eyes. The voice rose again, chastened, this time in the venerable cadences of the hymn for dawn:
“Jam lucis orto sidere
Statim oportet bibere.”
“The blasphemous pup,” said Abelard. He leaned out, to hear the rest of it:
“Now risen is the star of day.
Let us arise and drink straightway.
That we in peace this day may spend,
Drink we and drink, nor make an end.”
This was a better parody, because a simpler, than the one he had made upon it himself ten years ago, to illustrate for his students the difference between the accidents and the essential, the accidents being the words, the essential the tune. Lord, the Blessed Gosvin’s face when he began singing it! Doubtless he would be the Blessed Gosvin some day: so holy a youth could not fail of a sanctified old age. St. Gosvin perhaps: the youngster was Prior already at . . . he had forgotten where. The impudent, smooth-faced prig.
Abelard’s mind was running down a channel it knew and did not like: the moment in the classroom at St. Geneviève, when Gosvin’s reedy treble had interrupted the resonant voice from the rostrum with those innocent questionings, answered contemptuously, the master’s eyes half averted and his mind less than half attentive, till the sudden horrid silence brought him to his senses and he realised that he was trapped, even as he had so often trapped that good old goat, William of Champeaux. He had recovered, magnificently; but for the moment he had felt the hounds at his throat. And the cheering had been too vehement: they knew. Somebody on the Ile de Cité that night made a song about David and Goliath, not a very good song, but the name had stuck to him since, though not many remembered the origin of it. A pity, all the same, that Gosvin took to the cloister. It would be very pleasant to have him lecturing to empty benches at St. Geneviève, while at Notre Dame the students wedged open the doors and stood thick on the stairs. Thanks to that one trick, the pup will go all his life thinking he has a better brain than Master Peter Abelard, and he will tell the story to his novices, how the Lord once aided him, and he but a lad, to defend the truth, and one of them will write his life after he is dead, and pretend that there would have been a greater philosopher than Peter Abelard, if God had not called the Blessed Gosvin to holiness.
Oh, enough. The folly of it, to be in one’s thirty-seventh year and writhe like a worm in salt at a trifle that happened ten years ago. One forgot; and in a flash the agony came again, as if it were yesterday. Heaven knew there had been triumphs enough, before and since, to take that taste from his mouth. Poor William! William had driven him from Paris, and in the end he had driven William to the cloister, and now William was a bishop. Well, he had Abelard to thank for that, and his sermons might easily be better than his lectures. And old Anselm at Laon: sheep every one of them, with their meek faces, browsing over and over the old close-bitten pastures, with their “St. Augustine saith . . . St. Jerome saith . . . The Blessed Gregory saith . . .” As if one could not prove anything, and deny it, and prove it back again, out of St. Augustine alone. Some time he would do it, for a testimony unto them. Pit the Fathers one against the other. Smash the whole blind system of authority and substitute . . . Master Peter Abelard? said the mocking voice within him. He shook his head, suddenly humble. Not that. Not that. But a reasonable soul. The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. Abelard shuddered and was still. It was about him again, the dark immensity, the pressure of some greatness from without upon his brain, and that within which struggled to break through to it. I said, Ye are gods.
Behind him the room darkened. The flame of the candle sank, leaped and went out, and the abominable smell of a burnt-out wick reeked into the air. Abelard woke, cursed, and thrust the inkpot upon it. That dog, Guibert, where had he put the candles? The shiftless fool. But no bigger fool than himself, to keep the swine about the place.
“Guibert! Guibert!”
There was no answer. Abelard stumbled over a footstool, opened the door, and shouted down the stairs to the cupboard where Guibert slept when he was not employing his leisure in the Quartier. The door gaped open: the frowsy bed lay huddled as Guibert had that morning risen from it. Caterwauling again, said Abelard: though what the women see in him . . . Flatters them, I suppose, the way he does me, he thought ruefully. But there was something about him . . . that dog’s gaze of his, the tail at half-mast to go erect or clapped to its hindquarters, according to the look in your eye. And after all it was twenty years: twenty years since the pair of them had clattered down the stony track from Le Palais to go to Paris. What was it that Irishman wrote the other day? In those first days when youth in me was happy and life was swift in doing, and I wandering through the divers cities of sweet France for the love I had of learning, gave all my might to letters. They were good days. But no better, nor so good, as these. Abelard had come back to the window: it was too dark to read, and too early to sleep. He stood watching the jagged line of the roofs of St. Geneviève against the sky. They had driven him from Paris, and he had gone to St. Geneviève, and emptied the schools of Notre Dame. He had gone to Melun, and Paris had come to Melun. He had gone to Laon for theology—Gilles de Vannes had lifted his eyebrows at him and said, “Philosophy is my washpot: over Theology also will I cast out my shoe!”—and Paris had implored him to itself again. And now? He stood chewing the cud of old triumphs, anticipating fresh ones, omnipotence mounting higher in his heart. No need now to be a peripatetic philosopher: the world came to Paris, to him. Two Masters of Arts from Padua, a Doctor of Laws from Bologna, a handful of young men from Salamanca, a couple of Malachy’s men from Armagh, a rabble of English and Germans, and half the youngsters of France, from Bec to Montpellier and Toulouse. Yet some day he must see Rome. Plato said it would be well for that state whose king was a philosopher. What of Christendom, if a philosopher were Pope?
The wave of power swept up: he swung on the crest of it, indifferent as a strong swimmer. And swaying there, his mind began challenging the enigma of that other scholar, that Gerbert who also became Pope, though for three years only, till he died. Necromancer, devil-aided, devil-destroyed, said the legend, and all, Thierry of Chartres used to say, because he had a head for mathematics, and had studied Arabic and geometry at the schools of the Saracens. It was hard to come at any truth about him: but there, Abelard had always felt, was a man with whom he would have been on terms. The stories of his learning and his devilry might be equally fabulous, but he had written his own memorial in one line of his epitaph for Boethius:
“That intellect divine
Compels for thee the world’s imperium.”
Not intellect only, perhaps. Chicane and intrigue, as well as sheer momentum of genius. There was that ugly story of the archbishopric of Rheims. Abelard moved impatiently, his mind twitching away from the thought of it, the whispering, the smooth-faced strategy, the whole corroding business of administration, the pygmy warfare of dean and chapter. He had seen enough of it already, since they made him Canon of Notre Dame. There was ordination too. Was it of Gerbert they told the story, how the pains of Hell took hold of him, saying his last Mass in the Jerusalem chapel at Rome, and the chalice slipped from his hands, and the wine fell like great gouts of blood, dripping from step to step of the altar stairs? He drew his mind away. Not yet. He could not yet set his hands about the Host.
The wave of omnipotence was receding. Abelard dropped on the chest by the window, his head resting on the sill. He knew only that he was very tired. Denise in Brittany used to hold his head between her hands when he was like this. Odd that when one was tired it was the only thing that brought some ease. Was that why the dying go more easily if someone will hold their hands? He shook himself, and stood up, to go to bed. The moon was higher now, and the shadow of Notre Dame had moved, revealing something that had shown only as a blot of darkness against the wall of the Cloister. It stirred: the shadow became two shadows: for a moment the moon shone on a girl’s upturned face, blanched in its light. Then the other shadow stooped over it, and they were one shadow again. Abelard stood looking down, his mouth contemptuous. Yet there was a quality in the rigidity of those silent figures that held him. He could not reach them. Time was with him. Eternity flowed about those two.
Twelve. At the first stroke the two shivered apart. The girl ran like a lapwing across the steps of Notre Dame, and towards the Rue Sainte Marine. The man came steadily enough across the Parvis, and under the projecting houses. A moment later, and Abelard heard his stealthy foot upon the stair. So it was Guibert who had inhabited eternity a moment since. With a hearty reaction of disgust, Abelard flung open the door, and an avalanche of malediction volleyed down the stair.