She appears to entertain no hope that he will visit her, though she hints longingly at the possibility; but he can at least do as much for her as he does for others under obligations so far slighter, as much as the example of the church fathers regarding the women of their flocks teaches him to do,—he can write and tell her how he is, he can comfort her love: or (and she appeals to the monk who may listen, even if the old-time lover will not) he can send spiritual admonition to uphold her slipping soul. Her heart put at rest, she can be so much freer for the divine service. "When you wooed me for the pleasures of earth," she reminds him, "you sent me letter after letter; with many songs you put your Heloise in the speech of all, so that every street and house echoed with me. How much more ought you now to excite toward God the one whom then you aroused to sin."
She tells him again of her complete absorption in him: "You are the only one who can make me either sad or happy; you only can be my comforter. The whole world knows how much I loved you," and she turns with a half-shuddering reminiscence to the day she became a nun. "It was for you, not for God—that sacrifice. From God I can look for no reward; consider, then, how vain my trial, if by it I win nothing from you"; and the woman for sixteen years a nun calls God—and remember that hers was the God of mediæval superstition—to witness that she would have followed Abelard, or gone before him, if she had seen him hastening to hell.
Her letters evidently moved the monk, for his replies were full of good advice, and under the surface gave some indications of tender regard. But the affection that we find is colorless and formal. No word of a husband's gentleness, nor warmth of phrase, not a hint that he cherishes happy memories of the old days of their union. They are the letters of an old man, absorbed in himself, worn by the world, who has no capacity for anything deeper than kind feeling. He calls her his sister, once dear in the world, now dearer in Christ, begs her prayers for him living and dead, and entreats that whenever he may die she will have his body carried to her abbey, that the constant sight of his grave may move her and her spiritual daughters to pray for his salvation. He gulps down the Lachrima Christi of her exquisite love as if it were the small beer of pietistic commonplace, and then looks disappointed to find that it was not. For he ignores the soul of her letters, and composes complacent treatises of twelfth-century ecclesiastical discipline designed to subject her to a mechanical and lifeless asceticism.
Heloise in answer reproaches him for his talk of death, like a brave heart bidding him not by anticipation suffer before his time. The knowledge of her husband's unhappiness is a renewed affliction, and she owns that there is nothing but sorrow in her life. Like a daring Titaness, she exclaims against God's administration of his world:
"While we lived in sin, he indulged us; when we married, he forced us to separate. Let his other creatures rejoice and count themselves safe from the inclement clemency of the God whom I almost dare to call cruel to me in every way. They are safe, for upon me he has used up all the weapons of his wrath, so that he has none with which to rage at others; nor, if any remained, could he find a place in me wherein to strike them."
After sixteen years' silence, this woman has broken into speech, and unmasked confessions of her inner spirit will no longer be restrained. She goes on as if carried by cyclone winds; she tells her far-off lover what few nuns under terror of eternal death can ever have brought themselves to confide to their confessors in scarcely audible whisper. She calls up the scenes of their union; she confesses that visions of that life are with her constantly: she bemoans the thoughts which "haunt me sometimes, even at the holy mass." She was no calm northern woman; she had nothing of the temperament that Shakespeare compared to an icicle
"That's curdied by the frost from purest snow,
And hangs on Dian's temple";
she was made to walk with love, under summer moonlight,—no sister of Percivale, to forget thwarted desire in prayer beneath the frosty stars of winter.
"Help me," cries this victim of a gloomy religion, "for I do not find how by penance to appease God, whom I still accuse of the greatest cruelty. It is easy to confess and to torture the body; it is hard to tear the soul from its desires. My mind keeps the same wish for sin; so sweet was our happiness that I cannot be sorry for it. Most wretched life, if I have endured so much in vain, destined to have no recompense hereafter."