The convent gates shut in all sight of her for the next ten or eleven years. But in 1130, the nunnery over which she had become prioress was broken up by the unfavorable decision of a suit for the land and buildings which it occupied. This decade had brought abundant misery to Abelard. His heresies in theology had been exposed, and he had been compelled to burn a treasured book in which they were expounded, a council had imprisoned him in an abbey where it was boasted that his haughtiness was tamed by a course of vigorous whipping administered under the abbot's supervision. There is something pitiful in the thought of such physical and mental pride being under the control of fanatical monks, ignorant and coarse, from whom he was glad to escape to a desert east of Troyes, as a hermit. He had taught at intervals during these years, and once for a season with a notable renewal of his early success. Near Troyes, where he had built his hermit-shelter out of reeds and stubble, in a desolate region infested by wild animals and a covert for robbers, some vagrant student found the intellectual champion, and reported at Paris his discovery. The news spread, and soon the desert was populous. The students built a house for the master, apparently a commodious one, and about it they made more temporary structures for their own shelter. Not only the younger class of scholars besieged him for instruction; older men, ecclesiastics who, as we are told, were wont to grasp instead of giving, paid generously toward constructing a home for the great philosopher. But he was world-weary, and soon retired again to a bleak monastery on the Atlantic, in the lower part of Brittany, where he became abbot of a set of half-barbarous monks, who resented his austere rule and, so he tells us, tried repeatedly to poison him because he interfered with their profligacy. While there he had learned of Heloise's loss of her nunnery, and had established her and her religious sisters in the buildings in Champagne that had been standing unoccupied since he broke up that last school. "The Paraclete," he had called the home, as a special invocation to the Holy Spirit and as a tribute for the temporary comfort that he received there. Possibly he himself conducted his wife thither, but it is equally likely that he did not see her after he forced her into the church.
For ten years he appears to have struggled on in Brittany, with no intellectual associations, none of the notoriety with which he had been so long pampered, in terror for his life, yet still working at his philosophy of religion. At last he was impelled to talk of what he had endured and was still enduring; to speak in the bitterness of his soul, and get, perhaps, the consolation of pity. He composed a long and immensely interesting autobiography, telling the whole story of his youth, his later triumphs, his logical acumen, his love, his disgrace, the injustice of his condemnation by the conservative church, the tumult of his experiences in the lonely monastery of St. Gildas. The creditable pages are calmly written, the shameful unflinchingly. He tells how tremendous had been his love for Heloise, but he says nothing of loving her still. The narrative reveals an egotist, but it reveals as certainly one of the most striking characters of the Middle Ages.
We find ourselves inevitably speculating upon the life of Heloise during the sixteen or more years whose only recorded event is her removal from Argenteuil to the Paraclete. It might be that a reaction in her love would follow, when the grim captivity that she had dreaded so became yet more hateful in its realization; she might lose her old gentleness; it might become hopeless for her to try to adjust her spirit to its new conditions and to devote herself to even a submissive piety. From contemporary testimony we are sure that some of these possibilities did not come true. She won respect and even devotion as an abbess, her house prospered financially to her husband's undisguised surprise and admiration, her life was pure from the least fleck of reproach, or criticism in any quarter. May we go farther, and say that her spirit did adjust itself to its new conditions, and lose its pain in a submissive piety? For such a result we should find many parallels in mediæval religion; numerous accounts not to be cavilled at as legendary prove that in these monasteries souls which had suffered found peace. Nay, many a nun among these most refined groups of mediæval women, driven in one way or another to forsake the hope of love and earthly happiness, secured delight of heart in a sort of spiritual romance. As their emotion grew more subtilized, as asceticism burned away material impulse, some of the gentlest and most poetically endowed of these religious recluses acquired a mystical compensation for their loneliest sacrifice of life,—a divinely idealized personal love, too magical for friendship, too impassioned and mutual for worship, where, the sexes mysteriously spiritualized, translated womanhood should rest at last on the breast of Christ. The final vow of religious consecration was the nun's betrothal to the divine man; to make herself beautiful for his bride she wasted her body by fasting and scarred it with the scourge; the rough lath cross on the wall of her cell was his love token; love messages came from him in her dreams; prostrated on the chapel flagging she indited to him prayers that scarcely needed verse to become lyrics. And when to such a mystic's contemplation the cloister sanctity seemed too worldly, when her exhausted body found the walk from cell to chapel too long a journey and she was compelled to stay in the coffin that for years of nights had sweetly reminded her of the sure untwining of soul and sense, when she could hear only faintly her sisters' thin chanting of the hours, and felt her spirit quivering with new sensations, vague, awed, and eager, she understood that the waiting time was over, and her espousal at hand. Her failing eyes see white processionals that come to lead her to the banqueting house where the banner of His love shall be over her; the music, which the dying so often hear, for her is a marriage melody ringing from angelic harps and dulcimers; with new-born strength and grace, mantled in new raiment, she floats upward to her desire. And when space has been traversed the immortal vision bursts upon her, a great poet has put in words her last thought this side heaven:
"He lifts me to the golden doors,
The flashes come and go;
All heaven bursts her starry floors,
And strows her light below,
And deepens on and up! the gates
Roll back, and far within
For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits,
To make me pure of sin.
The sabbaths of Eternity,
One sabbath deep and wide,—
A light upon the shining sea,
The Bridegroom with his bride."
But for Heloise there was no such resource. It is to natures more ethereal and constitutionally religious that such fancies and dreams appeal. The main feature of the matured Heloise is sanity and balanced womanhood; she was too strong and intense to be a sentimentalist. Could the nature which had once been caught into the clouds by the whirlwind of love, beguile itself from the memory of that storm of rapture by a visionary tempest raised with a fan? And yet there would be some satisfaction if we could conceive her adjusting herself to the spiritual life with closer accord, and passing even through the gates of superstitious hallucination from the harsh religion of her day into the inner sanctuary whose "solemn shadow is better than the sun," finding an outlet for her quick emotions in this personal love for her new Master.
Heloise had been a nun some sixteen years when some one showed her Abelard's so-called Historia Calamitatum. Apparently her husband had forbidden her to write to him; but though she had kept a long silence, she was a lover until death. This account of Abelard's sufferings and perils broke her constraint; she could not help writing to comfort him and to beg for news of his safety. What other love-letters equal the intensity, the tenderness, the womanliness of these final appeals for the broken love? Through their nervous pliancy one may learn as nowhere else the reality of Browning's
"Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
In them appears also her strength of nature; they are the love-calls of a woman who knows that the man she continues to set far above all the rest of humanity is wronging her. She chides him for this long and complete neglect, but there is a marvellous sweetness in her caressing reproaches. She tells him to remember under what peculiar bonds she holds him,—what sacred obligation of marriage, of love, and of devotion he owes to her; she gave her honor to please him, not herself; she sacrificed her tender age to the harshness of a monastic life not from piety, but only in submission to his desire. "There was a time," she writes, "when people doubted whether in our amour I yielded to love or to passion. But the end shows how I began; to please you, I have denied myself all pleasures." She points out to him how differently the end interprets his feeling for her. "It is common talk," she says, "that you felt only gross emotions toward me, and when there was a stop to their indulgence, your so-called love vanished. My dearest one, would that this appeared to me only, and not to every one; would that I might be soothed by hearing others excuse you, or that I could myself devise excuses."