was realized in the case of numbers of convertites quite equalling and probably far exceeding those who entered the ascetic orders from the enthusiasm of visionaries. To this retirement, as a screen from the world's curiosity and fancied mocks, Abelard now resolved to withdraw, as his father and mother in their later lives had done before him. His jealousy could not leave Heloise behind, so he told her of his purpose, and hoped that she would volunteer to imitate him. But Heloise made no such offer. In every way hers was a mind beyond her age, and the unnatural harshness of cloistral discipline, its artificial dreariness, its "hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell," seemed to her fine insight untrue. Though she had suffered, she was yet in tune with life; her heart assured her that innocent pleasure is the soul's hymn of praise to God; bitterly as she shared her husband's misery, she saw no reason for separating her life and his; most of all, she revolted from the notion of professing religion with lip-service only. But Abelard urged, insisted, even commanded, and, seeing it to be his wish, the girl-wife yielded. She told herself that only she was responsible for her husband's afflictions; except for her, his prosperity would have continued undimmed; so the day was fixed on which, in her old nunnery, she should take the vows of perpetual seclusion.
It must have been a strange scene in that chapel at Argenteuil. Abelard was there, still in his habit of a mere secular priest, there to make sure that Heloise's impulses should not burst out again, and cast her back into the world's sunshine. The bishop, attended by his priests, stands at the altar: upon it lies a newly consecrated veil. The nuns, kneeling in their accustomed places, are praying. All wait for the votaress, but she is detained by a crowd of friends. There were many of them there, as Abelard has told us, and they could not endure that this girl, personally so charming, perhaps the most accomplished intellectually of all the women of France, should consummate the sacrifice that she had already in such large measure made. They knew her love for the bright things of life, her beautiful zest for the joyous and sympathetic, her eagerness in study, the grace of her strong, sweet seriousness. Such a nature might be for a time bewildered at the loss of the love of one of the most famous men living, yet if for a little while they could keep her face unhidden by the veil, she might forget. So they delay her outside the chapel, pleading with a heart that has made the same pleas for itself before. Presently the door is pushed open and she enters the oratory, her friends still about her. Even in the sacred place they continue their entreaties, and Abelard's glance is anxiously upon her; but her eyes are downcast. "How they pitied her!" he has told us; "they kept trying to hold back her youth from the yoke of monastic rule, as from punishment intolerable." The bishop seems half pitiful, half impatient; the nuns look up from their praying. Has the world renewed its hold upon her? Will she snatch herself from God? Does he no longer attract her? At this last moment is she hesitating?
She was hesitating; the world did have a hold upon her. God? God had never attracted her.
In all the ceremonials of the Catholic Church, there can have been none which has so combined sacrilege with loftiness of feeling as did the scene which followed. From the silent, even wistful hearing that she has been giving to her friends, Heloise suddenly starts away, and, as if waking from a reverie, she moves with dreamy gesture toward her husband. Her lips part, and what will be her last words as a lady of the world? Some scriptural exhortation to her friends to follow her as she follows Christ? A cry of exultant renunciation of the wilds of life's ocean, and of contentment at the holy calm in the bosom of the church?
The girl is weeping, and as she tries to control herself to speak, her misery overcomes her, and she bursts into loud sobs. But it must have been surprising to the listening ecclesiastics to hear the words which at last got expression. It is probably the only time in the church's history that a novice has taken her last vows with the prelude of a quotation from a love speech in a pagan poem, directing it not to the bleeding effigy of her present and eternal Master hanging above the altar, but to a human lover at her side. Heloise "broke out as she could between her tears and sobs," in a passage from one of the later books of Lucan's Pharsalia: surely as she spoke the lines, her voice grew steady, and her eyes looked bravely through the tears:
"Husband and lord, too worthy for my bed,
Can Fortune thus cast down so dear a head?
Fated to make thee wretched, why did I
Become thy wife? Accept the penalty;
I will endure it gladly."
I fancy that Abelard was quite as much impressed by the brilliant young mind that could make so apt and scholarly a quotation from the Roman classics, as by the heart which dared on the very margin of the altar to fling back to the world and up to God this protestation of its unfaltering human love, which took the vows of religion from no other motive than to impose torture upon itself—an offering not to God, but to Abelard.
As she spoke the verses, she hurried to the altar. Accipe pœnas, quas sponte luam,—her voice died away, the bishop received her, and covered her forever with the veil.
Heloise was only eighteen.