17 May

Héloise is buried alongside Abelard in the cemetery at the nunnery that he had built for her

1164 It is Europe’s oldest tale of romantic love. The theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142) had set up a school of philosophy on the Left Bank of the Seine, opposite the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris. One of his students, over twenty years his junior, was the gifted, beautiful Héloise (1101–64), whose care and education had been supervised by her doting uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral.

Of course they fell in love. She got pregnant. As so often with academic couples, their child naming was eccentric. They called their baby Astrolabe, after the last word in astronomical technology, recently introduced from Spain. When her guardian found out, he was furious, but after Abelard begged his forgiveness, and his permission to marry Héloise, Uncle Fulbert relented.

They did marry, but entirely against Héloise’s wishes. She argued that the publicity that the marriage would give to their affair would deprive Abelard of his job, and the world of a great teacher and philosopher. Leaving Astrolabe with Abelard’s sister, she went to stay in the convent at Argenteuil, north-west of Paris.

Then things took a really nasty turn. Suspecting that Abelard had abandoned his niece, Fulbert conspired with his kinsmen to break into Abelard’s lodgings and (as the victim himself put it circumspectly) ‘cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow’. Now Abelard too retired from the world, taking refuge in the Abbey of Saint Denis, where he became a monk. Later he would return to teaching (and intense theological controversy), but that’s another story.

These events entered literature in a remarkable series of five long letters they exchanged after their separation, in which she reiterates her passionate longing for him while chafing at the cloisters, and he admits his inability to forget her, though imploring her to turn to God in her distress.

The narrative of their affair started nothing less than a whole new literary fashion, the convention of romantic love. The second part of The Romance of the Rose (Jean de Meun, 1275), that classic of courtly love, picks up her objections to marriage, radically altering them to the accusation that the institution forces sex on the wife through the ‘mastership’ of the husband, rather than through spontaneous mutual passion, thus giving Chaucer the idea for his Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales (some time after 1380).

François Villon worked Héloise into his ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear’ lament, his ‘Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis’ (1533; see 8 January):

Où est la très sage Helloïs,

Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne

Pierre Esbaillart [Abelard] à Saint-Denis? …

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?1

Their story caught the imagination even of such an austere moralist as Alexander Pope. His ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1716) picks up Jean de Meun’s theme, allocating over twenty (out of 366) decasyllabic lines to her complaint against marriage: rather than wife, she says, ‘make me mistress to the man I love’.

Meanwhile, back in real life, Abelard’s only further contact with Héloise had been when he managed to establish her as Prioress of the Oratory of the Paraclete, which he had founded north-west of Troyes. On his death his remains were carried there, to be watched over by his lover until she too joined him in the tomb.

1 ‘Where is the very wise Héloise, / For whom was castrated and then made a monk / Pierre Esbaillart [Abelard] in Saint Denis? … / But where are the snows of yesteryear?’