The World's Greatest Books - Volume 9 Part 1

The World's Greatest Books.

Vol IX.

by Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton.

ABeLARD AND HeLOSE

Love-Letters

In the Paris cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, on summer Sundays, flowers and wreaths are still laid on the tomb of a woman who died nearly 750 years ago. It is the grave of Heloise and of her lover Abelard, the hero and heroine of one of the world's greatest love stories. Born in 1079, Abelard, after a scholastic activity of twenty-five years, reached the highest academic dignity in Christendom--the Chair of the Episcopal School in Paris. When he was 38 he first saw Heloise, then a beautiful girl of 17, living with her uncle, Canon Fulbert.

Abelard became her tutor, and fell madly in love with her. The pa.s.sion was as madly returned. The pair fled to Brittany, where a child was born. There was a secret marriage, but because she imagined it would hinder Abelard's advancement, Heloise denied the marriage. Fulbert was furious. With hired a.s.sistance, he invaded Abelard's rooms and brutally mutilated him. Abelard, distressed by this degradation, turned monk. But he must have Heloise turn nun; she agreed, and at 22 took the veil. Ten years later she learned that Abelard had not found content in his retirement, and wrote to him the first of the five famous letters. Abelard died in 1142, and his remains were given into the keeping of Heloise. Twenty years afterwards she died, and was buried beside him at Paraclete.

In 1800 their remains were taken to Paris, and in 1817 interred in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. The love-letters, originally written in Latin, about 1128, were first published in Paris in 1616.

_I.--Helose to Abelard_

Heloise has just seen a "consolatory" letter of Abelard's to a friend.

She had no right to open it, but in justification of the liberty she took, she flatters herself that she may claim a privilege over everything which comes from that hand.

"But how dear did my curiosity cost me! What disturbance did it occasion, and how surprised I was to find the whole letter filled with a particular and melancholy account of our misfortunes! Though length of time ought to have closed up my wounds, yet the seeing them described by you was sufficient to make them all open and bleed afresh. Surely all the misfortunes of lovers are conveyed to them through the eyes. Upon reading your letter I feel all mine renewed. Observe, I beseech you, to what a wretched condition you have reduced me; sad, afflicted, without any possible comfort unless it proceed from you. Be not then unkind, nor deny me, I beg of you, that little relief which you only can give. Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it has been said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.

"I shall always have this, if you please, and it will always be agreeable to me that, when I receive a letter from you, I shall know you still remember me. I have your picture in my room. I never pa.s.s it without stopping to look at it. If a picture, which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? We may write to each other; so innocent a pleasure is not denied us. I shall read that you are my husband, and you shall see me sign myself your wife. In spite of all our misfortunes, you may be what you please in your letter. Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing. There I shall read your most sacred thoughts; I shall carry them always about with me; I shall kiss them every moment. I cannot live if you will not tell me that you still love me.

"When you write to me you will write to your wife; marriage has made such a correspondence lawful and since you can without the least scandal satisfy me why will you not? I am not only engaged by my vows, but I have the fear of my uncle before me. There is nothing, then, that you need dread. You have been the occasion of all my misfortunes, you therefore must be the instrument of my comfort. You cannot but remember (for lovers cannot forget) with what pleasure I have pa.s.sed whole days in hearing your discourse; how, when you were absent, I shut myself from everyone to write to you; how uneasy I was till my letter had come to your hands; what artful management it required to engage messengers.

This detail perhaps surprises you, and you are in pain for what may follow. But I am no longer ashamed that my pa.s.sion for you had no bounds, for I have done more than all this.

"I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself in a perpetual imprisonment that I might make you live quietly and at ease. Nothing but virtue, joined to a love perfectly disengaged from the senses, could have produced such effects. Vice never inspires anything like this; it is too much enslaved to the body. This was my cruel uncle's notion; he measured my virtue by the frailty of my s.e.x, and thought it was the man and not the person I loved. But he has been guilty to no purpose. I love you more than ever, and so revenge myself on him. I will still love you with all the tenderness of my soul till the last moment of my life."

Formerly, she tells him, the man was the least she valued in him. It was his heart she desired to possess. "You cannot but be entirely persuaded of this by the extreme unwillingness I showed to marry you, though I knew that the name of wife was honourable in the world and holy in religion; yet the name of your mistress had greater charms because it was more free. The bonds of matrimony, however honourable, still bear with them a necessary engagement, and I was very unwilling to be necessitated to love always a man who would perhaps not always love me.

I despised the name of wife that I might live happy with that of mistress."

And then, ecstatically recalling the old happy times, she deplores that she has nothing left but the painful memory that they are past. Beyond that, she has no regret except that against her will she must now be innocent. "My misfortune was to have cruel relatives whose malice destroyed the calm we enjoyed; had they been reasonable, I had now been happy in the enjoyment of my dear husband. Oh, how cruel were they when their blind fury urged a villain to surprise you in your sleep! Where was I--where was your Heloise then? What joy should I have had in defending my lover! I would have guarded you from violence at the expense of my life. Oh, whither does this excess of pa.s.sion hurry me?

Here love is shocked, and modesty deprives me of words."

She goes on to reproach him with his neglect and silence these ten years. When she p.r.o.nounced her "sad vow," he had protested that his whole being was hers; that he would never live but to love Heloise. But he has proved the "unfaithful one." Though she is immured in the convent, it was only harsh relatives and "the unhappy consequences of our love and your disgrace" that made her put on the habit of chast.i.ty.

She is not penitent for the past. At one moment she is swayed by the sentiment of piety, and next moment she yields up her imagination to all that is amorous and tender. "Among those who are wedded to G.o.d I am wedded to a man; among the heroic supporters of the Cross I am the slave of a human desire; at the head of a religious community I am devoted to Abelard alone. Even here I love you as much as ever I did in the world.

If I had loved pleasures could I not have found means to gratify myself?

I was not more than twenty-two years old, and there were other men left though I was deprived of Abelard. And yet I buried myself in a nunnery, and triumphed over life at an age capable of enjoying it to its full lat.i.tude. It is to you I sacrifice these remains of a transitory beauty, these widowed nights and tedious days."

And then she closes pa.s.sionately: "Oh, think of me--do not forget me--remember my love, and fidelity, and constancy: love me as your mistress, cherish me as your child, your sister, your wife! Remember I still love you, and yet strive to avoid loving you. What a terrible saying is this! I shake with horror, and my very heart revolts against what I say. I shall blot all my paper with tears. I end my long letter wis.h.i.+ng you, if you desire it (would to Heaven I could!), for ever adieu!"

_II. Abelard to Helose_

Abelard's answer to this letter is almost as pa.s.sionate. He tells how he has vainly sought in philosophy and religion a remedy for his disgrace; how with equal futility he has tried to secure himself from love by the rigours of the monastic life. He has gained nothing by it all. "If my pa.s.sion has been put under a restraint, my thoughts yet run free. I promise myself that I will forget you, and yet cannot think of it without loving you. After a mult.i.tude of useless endeavours I begin to persuade myself that it is a superfluous trouble to strive to free myself; and that it is sufficient wisdom to conceal from all but you how confused and weak I am. I remove to a distance from your person with an intention of avoiding you as an enemy; and yet I incessantly seek for you in my mind; I recall your image in my memory, and in different disquietudes I betray and contradict myself. I hate you! I love you! You call me your master; it is true you were entrusted to my care. I saw you, I was earnest to teach you; it cost you your innocence and me my liberty. If now, having lost the power of satisfying my pa.s.sion, I had also lost that of loving you, I should have some consolation. But I find myself much more guilty in my thoughts of you, even amidst my tears, than in possessing you when I was in full liberty. I continually think of you; I continually call to mind your tenderness."

He explains some of the means he has tried to make himself forget. He has tried several fasts, and redoubled studies, and exhausted his strength in constant exercises, but all to no purpose. "Oh, do not," he exclaims, "add to my miseries by your constancy. Forget, if you can, your favours and that right which they claim over me; allow me to be indifferent. Why use your eloquence to reproach me for my flight and for my silence? Spare the recital of our a.s.signations and your constant exactness to them; without calling up such disturbing thoughts I have enough to suffer. What great advantages would philosophy give us over other men if, by studying it, we could learn to govern our pa.s.sions?

What a troublesome employment is love!"

Then he tries to excuse himself for his original betrayal. "Those charms, that beauty, that air, which I yet behold at this instant, occasioned my fall. Your looks were the beginning of my guilt; your eyes, your discourse, pierced my heart; and, in spite of that ambition and glory which tried to make a defence, love was soon the master." Even now "my love burns fiercer amidst the happy indifference of those who surround me. The Gospel is a language I do not understand when it opposes my pa.s.sion. Void of all relish for virtue, without concern for my condition and without application to my studies, I am continually present by my imagination where I ought not to be, and I find I have no power to correct myself." He advises her to give up her mind to her holy vocation as a means of forgetting him. "Make yourself amends by so glorious a choice; make your virtue a spectacle worthy of men and angels. Drink of the chalice of saints, even to the bottom, without turning your eyes with uncertainty upon me. To forget Heloise, to see her no more, is what Heaven demands of Abelard; and to expect nothing from Abelard, to forget him even as an idea, is what Heaven enjoins on Heloise."

He acknowledges that he made her take the veil for his own selfish reasons, but is now bound to admit that "G.o.d rejected my offering and my prayer, and continued my punishment by suffering me to continue my love.

Thus I bear alike the guilt of your vows and of the pa.s.sion that preceded them, and must be tormented all the days of my life." Once more he adjures her to deliver herself from the "shameful remains" of a pa.s.sion which has taken too deep root. "To love Heloise truly," he closes, "is to leave her to that quiet which retirement and virtue afford. I have resolved it: this letter shall be my last fault. Adieu! I hope you will be willing, when you have finished this mortal life, to be buried near me. Your cold ashes need then fear nothing, and my tomb shall be more rich and renowned."

_III.--Helose to Abelard_

The pa.s.sion of Heloise is only inflamed by this letter from Abelard. She has got him to write, and now she wants to see him and to hear more about him. She cynically remarks that he has made greater advances in the way of devotion than she could wish. There, alas! she is too weak to follow him. But she must have his advice and spiritual comfort. "Can you have the cruelty to abandon me? The fear of this stabs my heart." She reproaches him for the "fearful presages" of death he had made in his letter. And as regards his wish that she should take care of his remains, she says: "Heaven, severe as it has been to me, is not so insensible as to permit me to live one moment after you. Life without Abelard were an insupportable punishment, and death a most exquisite happiness if by that means I could be united to him. If Heaven but hearken to my continual cry, your days will be prolonged and you will bury me." It is his part, she says, to prepare _her_ for the great crisis, to receive her last sighs. What could she hope for if _he_ were taken away? "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. Dear Abelard, pity my despair! The higher you raised me above other women, who envied me your love, the more sensible am I now of the loss of your heart. I was exalted to the top of happiness only that I might have the more terrible fall. Nothing could be compared to my pleasures, and now nothing can equal my misery."

She blames herself entirely for Abelard's present position. "I, wretched I, have ruined you, and have been the cause of all your misfortunes. How dangerous it is for a great man to suffer himself to be moved by our s.e.x! He ought from his infancy to be inured to insensibility of heart against all our charms. I have long examined things, and have found that death is less dangerous than beauty. It is the s.h.i.+pwreck of liberty, a fatal snare, from which it is impossible ever to get free."

She protests that she cannot forget. "Even into holy places before the altar I carry the memory of our love; and, far from lamenting for having been seduced by pleasures, I sigh for having lost them." She counts herself more to be pitied than Abelard, because grace and misfortune have helped him, whereas she has still her relentless pa.s.sions to fight.

"Our s.e.x is nothing but weakness, and I have the greater difficulty in defending myself, because the enemy that attacks me pleases me. I doat on the danger which threatens. How, then, can I avoid yielding? I seek not to conquer for fear I should be overcome; happiness enough for me to escape s.h.i.+pwreck and at last reach port. Heaven commands me to renounce my fatal pa.s.sion for you; but, oh! my heart will never be able to consent to it. Adieu."

_IV.--Helose to Abelard_

Abelard has not replied to this letter, and Heloise begins by sarcastically thanking him for his neglect. She pretends to have subdued her pa.s.sion, and, addressing him rather as priest than lover, demands his spiritual counsel. Thus caustically does she proclaim her inconstancy. "At last, Abelard, you have lost Heloise for ever.

Notwithstanding all the oaths I made to think of nothing but you, and to be entertained by nothing but you, I have banished you from my thoughts; I have forgot you. Thou charming idea of a lover I once adored, thou wilt be no more my happiness! Dear image of Abelard! thou wilt no longer follow me, no longer shall I remember thee. Oh, enchanting pleasures to which Heloise resigned herself--you, you have been my tormentors! I confess my inconstancy, Abelard, without a blush; let my infidelity teach the world that there is no depending on the promises of women--we are all subject to change. When I tell you what Rival hath ravished my heart from you, you will praise my inconstancy, and pray this Rival to fix it. By this you will know that 'tis G.o.d alone that takes Heloise from you."

She explains how she arrived at this decision by being brought to the gates of death by a dangerous illness. Her pa.s.sion now seemed criminal.

She has therefore torn off the bandages which blinded her, and "you are to me no longer the loving Abelard who constantly sought private conversations with me by deceiving the vigilance of our observers." She enlarges on her resolution. She will "no more endeavour, by the relation of those pleasures our pa.s.sion gave us, to awaken any guilty fondness you may yet feel for me. I demand nothing of you but spiritual advice and wholesome discipline. You cannot now be silent without a crime. When I was possessed with so violent a love, and pressed you so earnestly to write to me, how many letters did I send you before I could obtain one from you?"

But, alas! her woman's weakness conquers again. For the moment she forgets her resolution, and exclaims: "My dear husband (for the last time I use that t.i.tle!), shall I never see you again? Shall I never have the pleasure of embracing you before death? What dost thou say, wretched Heloise? Dost thou know what thou desirest? Couldst thou behold those brilliant eyes without recalling the tender glances which have been so fatal to thee? Couldst thou see that majestic air of Abelard without being jealous of everyone who beholds so attractive a man? That mouth cannot be looked upon without desire; in short, no woman can view the person of Abelard without danger. Ask no more to see Abelard; if the memory of him has caused thee so much trouble, Heloise, what would not his presence do? What desires will it not excite in thy soul? How will it be possible to keep thy reason at the sight of so lovable a man?"

She reverts to her delightful dreams about Abelard, when "you press me to you and I yield to you, and our souls, animated with the same pa.s.sion, are sensible of the same pleasures." Then she recalls her resolution, and closes with these words: "I begin to perceive that I take too much pleasure in writing to you; I ought to burn this letter.

It shows that I still feel a deep pa.s.sion for you, though at the beginning I tried to persuade you to the contrary. I am sensible of waves both of grace and pa.s.sion, and by turns yield to each. Have pity, Abelard, on the condition to which you have brought me, and make in some measure my last days as peaceful as my first have been uneasy and disturbed."

_V.--Abelard to Helose_

Abelard remains firm. "Write no more to me, Heloise, write no more to me; 'tis time to end communications which make our penances of no avail," he says. "Let us no more deceive ourselves with remembrance of our past pleasures; we but make our lives troubled and spoil the sweets of solitude. Let us make good use of our austerities, and no longer preserve the memories of our crimes amongst the severities of penance.

Let a mortification of body and mind, a strict fasting, continual solitude, profound and holy meditations, and a sincere love of G.o.d succeed our former irregularities."

Both, he deplores, are still very far from this enviable state. "Your heart still burns with that fatal fire you cannot extinguish, and mine is full of trouble and unrest. Think not, Heloise, that I here enjoy a perfect peace; I will for the last time open my heart to you; I am not yet disengaged from you, and though I fight against my excessive tenderness for you, in spite of all my endeavours I remain but too sensible of your sorrows, and long to share in them. The world, which is generally wrong in its notions, thinks I am at peace, and imagining that I loved you only for the gratification of the senses, have now forgot you. What a mistake is this!"

He exhorts her to strive, to be more firm in her resolutions, to "break those shameful chains which bind you to the flesh." He pictures the death of a saint and he works upon her fears by impressing upon her the terrors of h.e.l.l. His last recorded words to her are these:

"I question not, Heloise, but you will hereafter apply yourself in good earnest to the business of your salvation; this ought to be your whole concern. Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart--it is the best advice I can give you, for the remembrance of a person we have loved guiltily cannot but be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in the way of virtue. When you have extirpated your unhappy inclination towards me, the practice of every virtue will become easy; and when at last your life is conformable to that of Christ, death will be desirable to you. Your soul will joyfully leave this body, and direct its flight to heaven. Then you will appear with confidence before your Saviour; you will not read your reprobation in the Judgement Book, but you will hear your Saviour say: 'Come, partake of My glory, and enjoy the eternal reward I have appointed for those virtues you have practised.'

"Farewell, Heloise, this is the last advice of your dear Abelard; for the last time let me persuade you to follow the rules of the Gospel.

Heaven grant that your heart, once so sensible of my love, may now yield to be directed by my zeal. May the idea of your loving Abelard, always present to your mind, be now changed into the image of Abelard truly and sincerely penitent; and may you shed as many tears for your salvation as you have done for our misfortunes."