Peter Abelard was the most famous teacher in Paris, a philosopher whose arguments filled lecture rooms and made rivals nervous. Heloise was a young woman of exceptional learning, the niece of a canon of Notre-Dame. Their love affair is one of the great medieval romances, and it ended with a night attack that Abelard himself described in his own words. The brutal half of the story is the half that usually gets dropped.
The Horror
Heloise lived in the household of her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral. Fulbert, proud of her mind, engaged Abelard to tutor her and took him into the house. By Abelard’s own telling, in his Historia Calamitatum, he set out to seduce her. Modern accounts date the affair to about 1115 or 1116. Heloise’s later letters do not read like the letters of a girl who had been seduced, and the two accounts of the relationship do not quite agree. All that is known about the night itself comes from Abelard.
Heloise became pregnant. Abelard took her away, and she bore a son, whom they named Astrolabe after the instrument. Abelard’s sister is said to have raised the boy. To appease Fulbert, Abelard proposed marriage, but in secret, so that his career would not be wrecked. Heloise was reluctant, and by her own later account preferred love to the bond of marriage. She agreed in the end. When Fulbert made the marriage known, she denied it, which only angered him further. Abelard then sent her to the convent at Argenteuil.
Fulbert took this for abandonment. According to Abelard, his kinsmen bribed one of Abelard’s servants, broke into the hidden room where he slept, and castrated him. Wikipedia’s summary says Fulbert himself arranged the attack. Abelard’s text blames the kinsmen and does not name Fulbert as the one who ordered it. The date is conventionally given as about 1117, but no source gives a firm year, so that date should be taken as approximate.
Two of the attackers were caught. Abelard says they were blinded and castrated in turn, and one of them was the servant who had betrayed him. Other accounts say only that members of the band were punished. The claim, often repeated, that Fulbert was ruined or stripped of his goods is not in Abelard’s own text. A modern summary says only that Fulbert, scorned by the public, took temporary leave from his duties as a canon.
Abelard says the whole city gathered at his door the next morning, and that his students’ weeping hurt him more than the wound. What he felt most was shame. He feared that his reputation was finished, and he recalled that scripture barred maimed men from the church. He took the monastic habit at the abbey of St Denis, and he told Heloise to take the veil at Argenteuil. She did, and by her own later account it was obedience and love, not any calling, that took her there.
The persecution of his ideas followed. A council at Soissons condemned his teaching on the Trinity, and he was made to throw his own book into the fire. The sentence of confinement was effectively lifted within days. In 1141, at Sens, Bernard of Clairvaux’s supporters had propositions condemned in advance. Ill, Abelard left and appealed to the Pope. The Pope condemned him, but Peter the Venerable of Cluny intervened and the sentence was softened. Abelard died on April 21, 1142, at the priory of St Marcel near Chalon-sur-Saone.
Heloise outlived him by about twenty years. She moved to the Paraclete, the community Abelard had founded, and became its abbess. Sources give her death as 1163 or 1164, and a precise date is disputed. Their letters survive. A minority of scholars, including John Benton, doubt that they are authentic as they stand, but most accept them.
The Tradition of the Joint Burial
The popular version says that Heloise was buried beside Abelard, and that the two lie together at last. Part of this is sound. Abelard’s remains were moved from St Marcel to the Paraclete, and Heloise’s were placed near them. After that, the record is thin. The remains were moved several times, and no source read here says where each stood at each stage. This part is tradition, not fact.
The Modern Relic
The couple’s remains are presumed to lie beneath the tomb in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where they were transferred in 1817. The move was made as part of an effort to draw burials to the new cemetery. The Gothic canopy over the tomb was made from fragments of the abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine. People still come to leave letters at the crypt, either in tribute or in hope of finding love.
Whether the bones are really there is disputed. The Oratory of the Paraclete claims that the couple is buried at the Paraclete and that the Paris monument is a cenotaph. Others believe that only Abelard is in the Paris tomb and that Heloise’s remains are elsewhere. The cemetery says the remains were transferred from the Paraclete in the early nineteenth century. Which of these is correct is not settled by the sources.
