A History of the Wife (11 page)

A modern reader will undoubtedly be outraged at the thought of this teacher and cleric plotting the seduction of an adolescent. But instead of imposing our own values on the early twelfth century, let us turn to Héloïse’s memories of the same events.

What king, what philosopher could equal your renown? What coun- try, what town, what city did not simmer with excitement to see you? Who, I ask, did not hurry to admire you when you appeared in pub- lic? . . . What married woman, what unmarried woman did not desire you in your absence, did not burn in your presence? . . . you possessed in particular two gifts that could instantly attract the heart of any woman: you knew how to compose poetry and to sing . . . gifts that were utterly lacking in the other philosophers.

Abelard was clearly a celebrity, the equivalent of a media star today, capable of drawing oversized crowds and impassioned fans. And despite his attractiveness, he had remained celibate until he became enflamed by his love for Héloïse. In order to gain access to her, he pro- posed to her uncle that he should lodge in the canon’s house in exchange for the private lessons he would give Héloïse.

Before long Abelard had Héloïse completely in thrall. Not only did

he approach her with the authority conferred by age, sex, vocation, and fame—he also had the right to chastise her. At that time chastisement was both a verbal and physical affair, allowing Abelard the “opportunity to make her bend more easily through menaces and blows, if seduction failed.” Seduction did not fail. But what Abelard had not anticipated was the mutual nature of their passion, the way he too became intoxi- cated. Both gave themselves to erotic delight with the ardor of first-time lovers.

Yet there was a downside to sexual pleasure: Abelard’s work as a philosopher and teacher began to suffer. His students began to com- plain of his absentmindedness, and rumors began to circulate. Finally, Héloïse’s uncle could no longer remain blind to the affair that was going on in his very house, and the lovers were obliged to separate.

Not surprisingly, Héloïse discovered she was pregnant. Abelard decided to send her away to Brittany to his sister, where she spent the rest of her pregnancy. He, however, remained in Paris, and had to con- front Héloïse’s uncle, Fulbert. Clearly this was an affair between men, and between them they decided that Abelard should marry the woman he had “dishonored.” Abelard’s only condition was that the marriage take place secretly, so that his reputation and career would not suffer. Because he was only a cleric who had not been ordained, he could, according to canon law, take a wife, but marriage would prevent him from teaching. Interestingly, Héloïse’s dishonor would be repaired through marriage, whereas his position as a famous cleric would be tar- nished by that same act.

After the birth of their son, named Astrolabe and left in the care of Abelard’s sister, the lovers returned secretly to Paris. Abelard intended to marry Héloïse, as he had promised her uncle. The only obstacle to this marriage was Héloïse herself.

True to the prejudices of her age, she believed that philosophy and theology did not belong under the same roof that sheltered wives and babies, or, as Abelard later put it: “What person, absorbed by religious or philosophic meditations, could endure the crying of newborn babies, the songs of their nurses to quiet them, the noisy crowd of ser- vants? What disgust in having to bear the continual filth of little chil- dren!” Both Abelard and Héloïse had clearly internalized the old commonplaces used to discourage clerics from marriage.

Héloïse did not want to be the ruin of the man she idolized. She pre-

ferred to be called his friend, sister, and lover (
amica
), rather than his wife, and to be joined to him only by her feelings, rather than by the constraints of the conjugal bond. As she wrote later: “And if the name of wife seems more sacred and stronger, the name of ‘amica’ always seemed sweeter, like the names—without wanting to shock you—of concubine or courtesan.” Preferring “love to marriage, liberty to bondage,” she sounds more like a liberated woman of the twentieth century than a medieval mother raised by a canon within the church close.

But Héloïse’s protests were of no avail; Abelard decided to honor his promise to her uncle. The lovers were secretly married in church at the break of day in the presence of Fulbert and a few witnesses. In order to keep the marriage secret, Abelard and Héloïse then went their separate ways, meeting only occasionally and with the greatest discretion. The story might have ended there, were it not for the horrible incident mas- terminded by Héloïse’s uncle. What happened next wreaked havoc on the couple’s union and made their history famous for posterity.

Shortly after the marriage ceremony, while the two spouses were liv- ing apart, Fulbert began to speak publicly of the marriage, contrary to the promise of secrecy he had made. He was not satisfied with the turn of events, and wanted further compensation for the family honor. When Fulbert began to beat Héloïse, Abelard decided to abduct her and place her in an abbey, the very same one where, as a girl, she had been raised and educated. He had religious garments made for her that were appropriate to her new life in the monastery. She dressed like a nun, except for the veil, which was reserved for those who took lifelong vows. Believing that Abelard had sent Héloïse to the abbey so as to gain his freedom, Fulbert punished him with a cruel act of revenge. While he was asleep, servants acting under Fulbert’s orders entered Abelard’s room and cut off his testicles.

Years later, when Abelard remembered this event, he not only spoke of the pain and shame, but also of God’s strange justice. “What right- eous decision of God had struck me in that part of my body through which I had sinned!” Though it was common during the Middle Ages to punish people by mutilating the part of the body associated with a criminal act, one doubts if this was Abelard’s first reaction. Confused and ashamed, he took refuge in a cloister.

And what of Héloïse? Once again, her fate was decided by Abelard,

and this time, irrevocably. He ordered that she take the veil perma- nently, and both of them donned the habit the same day, he in the abbey of Saint-Denis and she in the monastery of Argenteuil. Héloïse was, at the most, seventeen; Abelard, thirty-nine.

Could this dramatic tale have ended differently? What was there to prevent Abelard and Héloïse from living together as man and wife? In truth, there was no outside obstacle. Having been married within the church, Héloïse and Abelard were legal spouses in every sense of the word. Even the fact of castration would not have constituted an obsta- cle, since the church granted annulment only when the marriage had not been consummated; also, men who have had their testicles removed could still be capable of sexual activity. But living together as spouses did not seem to interest Abelard. After all that had happened, he decided to return to his earlier vocation as a celibate cleric. He lived out the rest of his life—another twenty-four years—as a monk, writer, teacher, and founder of the abbey of Paraclet, in which, by a strange twist of fate, Héloïse would rise to the rank of abbess.

Let us return to her version of their story as told in the two letters she wrote to Abelard from Paraclet. The salutation of her first letter speaks worlds about the difference in their stations: “To her seigneur, or rather her father; to her husband, or rather her brother; [from] his ser- vant, or rather his daughter; his spouse, or rather his sister.” Fifteen years after the events which had caused their separation, Héloïse, the abbess of Paraclet, spoke to Abelard with the voice of a mistress and wife. “I am yours,” she wrote, “in a unique way.... You are linked to me by the greatest of obligations . . . by the nuptial sacrament, and even more strongly because I have always loved you... with a limitless love.”

Héloïse reproached her husband for having abandoned her after she had followed his commandments in every way. “Give me a single rea- son, if you can, which explains why, after our mutual entry into reli- gious life, for which you alone made the decision, you have so competely deserted and forgotten me that I have neither your presence nor your words to give me courage, nor even a letter to console me in your absence.” She reminded him more than once that she had accepted his decision to take up “the hardship of the monastic life not through devotion,” but because Abelard had ordered her to do so. Clearly Héloïse felt that her primary allegiance was to her former

teacher, lover, and master, who was still her husband.

Héloïse’s passionate feelings for Abelard are expressed even more openly in her second letter. She admits that she cannot chase from her memory the “voluptuous pleasures” they had tasted together: “Wher- ever I turn, they force themselves into my eyes.” Unlike Abelard, who viewed his former actions as sinful and expressed an absence of sexual longing, Héloïse confessed that she still sighed for lost pleasures. “Not only the acts realized, but also the places and the moments where I experienced them with you are so fixed in my mind that I relive every- thing with you in the same circumstances, and even in my sleep, they give me no peace.”

The differences in Abelard’s and Héloïse’s reactions to their separa- tion have called forth endless commentary over the centuries. Misogy- nist critics have attributed Héloïse’s lust to the lascivious nature of all women, or to women’s proclivity to make love the exclusive focus of their lives. Some have praised Abelard for his virtuous retirement into chastity and greater devotion to God. Few have emphasized the differ- ence in their ages—after all, Héloïse was thirty-two at the time of the correspondence and Abelard fifty-four, which may have accounted somewhat for the difference in their sexual appetites, without taking into consideration the effect of his castration. Moreover, as Héloïse hon- estly confessed, she did not choose the religious life; it was chosen for her. She admitted that she was more afraid of offending Abelard and more eager to please him than God Himself. Hardly the words one expects to hear from the mouth of an abbess!

Ten years after these letters were written, Abelard died and was buried at Paraclet. Héloïse lived on another twenty years, and when she died in 1164, she was buried beside her husband.

This remarkable story, unique in both the quality of the players and the macabre nature of the events, bears witness to the hazards that marriage might entail for a clergymen. A woman living with or married to a priest (alternately called a “priest’s wife” or a “priest’s whore”) may have been tolerated by medieval society, but she, more than he, was usually blamed for
his
lapsed celibacy. While he was allowed to con- tinue his public vocation, the priest’s wife was well advised to keep a low profile. Héloïse was sequestered in a convent for most of her mar- ried life—a fate usually reserved for single women or widows. Her story, however unique, gives us an account of sexual passion from the

perspective of a wife in twelfth-century France, a century famous for the rapid rise of magnificent religious edifices and for a new vision of heterosexual love.

THE BIRTH OF ROMANTIC LOVE

It has been argued that the French “invented” romantic love in the twelfth century.
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Its model was the perfect knight and the inaccessi- ble lady, usually the wife of a king. Romantic love existed primarily outside marriage in an atmosphere of secrecy, which intensified the experience, as in the myth of Tristan and Iseut, the legendary Celtic couple who drank a love potion by accident and from that point on could not live without each other, even though Iseut was destined to be the wife of King Mark of Cornwall, Tristan’s lord. When King Mark began to suspect he was being cuckolded, Tristan was ultimately forced to flee. Nonetheless, he and Iseut carried their love for each other into the grave. As opposed to “ordinary love” that changes according to the circumstances of daily life, the story of Tristan and Iseut represents the power of an irresistible and inexhaustible pas- sion, a “fatal love” that overcomes suffering and even death. Their watchword is the motto of all true lovers: “Neither you without me, nor I without you.”

This vision of love, which originated in the courts of Southern France and then spread to the North, offered a new way of conceptual- izing gender relations. It reversed traditional masculine and feminine roles, granting the woman power over the man. She was there to com- mand him, he to serve her. True, this vision was limited to a miniscule portion of the feudal world and was designed as a counter-reality to prevailing norms, but for the first time, woman was placed in a position of superiority.

In literature, the true knight would serve his lady selflessly and exclusively, with the same dedication that a vassal owed his lord or a wife owed her husband. She would effect a total transformation in him, leading him toward spiritual perfection, while she remained unattain- able. Much ink has been shed trying to determine if the lady really was unattainable. Since she was invariably married, usually to the knight’s lord, there was no question of marriage between the lovers. Were they required to be chaste? Theoretically they were, but in practice often

they were not.

Consider the example of Lancelot, immortalized in the verse narra- tive written by Chrétien de Troyes around 1180. Lancelot is both the perfect knight and the perfect lover. Indeed, his extraordinary strength in battle stems from his intense love for Queen Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur. Nothing can stop him when it is a question of saving Guinevere from the evil prince who holds her in captivity, and when the time comes to reward him, she does so in the flesh, as in the fol- lowing passage from Chrétien’s
Lancelot
.

Then the Queen stretched out her arms and wrapped them around him, and then drew him tightly to her chest. Thus she drew him into her bed. . . . Now Lancelot has everything he wants because the queen wel- comes his company and his caresses with favor, because he holds her in his arms just as she holds him in hers. This play is so sweet and so good, this play of kisses, this play of the senses. . . . Lancelot had much joy and pleasure the whole night long.
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