For three or four years Abélard sustained this miserable existence almost without alleviation. In 1129, however, an event occurred which, evil as it looked at the moment, proved a source of considerable happiness to him for some years.
Abbot Suger, the cowled warrior and statesman, had become monastic reformer after his conversion. The circumstance proved more lucrative to St. Denis than would be thought. In his De rebus a se gestis, Suger writes at great length of the additional possessions he secured for the abbey, and amongst these is enumerated the nunnery of St. Mary at Argenteuil. He was not only a rigid disciplinarian, but he had an unusual acquaintance with ancient records. Many of his early years at St. Denis had been spent in the archivium, in diligent scrutiny of deeds and documents relating to the earlier history of the abbey. One day when he was absorbed in this study he hit upon a document from which it seemed possible to prove that the convent of the Benedictine nuns at Argenteuil, two or three miles away, belonged to the monks of St. Denis. It was a complicated question, the nuns dating their possession from the time of Charlemagne. But when Suger became abbot of St. Denis himself, and eager to employ his political ability and influence in the service of the abbey, he recollected, along with others, the document relating to the nunnery. When, moreover, he had been converted, he was able to see the licentiousness of the nuns of Argenteuil, and make it a pretext for asserting the rights of his abbey.
In 1127, he states in his Life, he obtained from Honorius II. a bull which was supposed to legalise his seizure of the convent: ‘both in justice to ourselves and on account of the enormity of life of the nuns who were established there, he restored the place to us with its dependencies, so that the religious life might be re-instituted in it.’ In his Vita Ludovici Grossi he also lays stress on the ‘foul enormity’ of life in the nunnery.
How far we may accept the strong language of the enterprising abbot it would be difficult to say. Honorius, who would be flattered by the request to pronounce on the domestics difficulties of the Church of France, would certainly not be over-exacting in the matter of proof. Still, he sent a legate, the Bishop of Albano, and directed him to hold an inquiry into the affair, together with the Archbishop of Rheims and the Bishops of Paris, Chartres, and Soissons. The name of Geoffrey of Chartres is a guarantee that the inquiry was more than a mere cloak to cover the sanctioning of a questionable act. Although, we must remember, Suger does not quote their words in the above passage, they must have decided that his charge was substantially founded. The nuns were turned out of their convent a few months afterwards.
The asserted corruption of the nunnery is quite in accord with what we know of the period from other sources. We have already quoted Jacques de Vitry’s observation that none of the convents of the time, except those of the Cistercians (his own order), were fit places for an honest woman; and he describes the ‘thousand tricks and wicked artifices’ by which respectable dames were sometimes induced to enter them. The same Vandyke-like painter of the morals of the twelfth century elsewhere passes a comprehensive sentence on the convents of canonesses. Nor was this the first Parisian nunnery to be suppressed in the twelfth century. There was until 1107 a convent of Benedictine nuns on the island, on the site of the present Rue Calende. It was close to the royal palace; and the relations of the nuns to the nobles of the court had become so notorious that Bishop Galo had to intervene and put the good sisters on the street. One has only to read Abélard’s sermon on ‘Susannah’ (delivered to an exemplary community of nuns) to realise the condition of the average nunnery at that time.
Heloise was prioress of the convent of Argenteuil. This is, indeed, the only circumstance that need make us hesitate to accept Suger’s words at their literal value. The Heloise of those writers who have but touched the love-romance of the famous couple, without entering into a deeper study of their characters, is pitifully inadequate. She had all the passion that poetic or decadent admirer has ever given her; she had that freer, because narrower, view of the love-relation, which only regarded her own particular and exceptional case, and did not extend to the thousand cases on which the broad law of matrimony is based; and she retained her ardent love and her particularist view throughout long years of conventual life. We may examine this more directly in the next chapter. For the moment it reveals, when it is taken in conjunction with that integrity and altitude of life which none can hesitate to assign her, a strength and elevation of character which are frequently obscured by the mere admirers of her passion. We know nothing whatever of the eight or nine miserable years of her life at Argenteuil; but as soon as she does emerge into the light of history (in 1130) she is found to be of an elevated and commanding character. She was prior, not abbess, at Argenteuil. When she became abbess, her community became a centre of light in France.
Still, Heloise shared the fate of her sisters, if she had not shared their sin; in fact, we may see a protest against their life in her refusal to follow them to a new home. Suger had been directed to find a nunnery which would receive the evicted sisters, and most of them had gone to St. Mary of Footel. Heloise had not accompanied them, and she was still without a canonical home in 1129, when the news of these events reached the distant abbey of St. Gildas.
The finest and supreme test of love is to purge it of the last subtle admixture of sexual feeling and then measure its strength. As a rule this is wholly impracticable—Mr. W. Platt has a remarkable paper on the subject in his Women, Love, and Life—but in the case of Abélard the test was applied in supreme rigour, and with a satisfactory issue. There was indeed another consideration impelling Abélard, when he sought out his nun-wife. The desertion of the Paraclete had cost him many a heavy thought. The little estate was still his legal property, but it was insufficient to support a priest and companion at the oratory. He would assuage both anxieties by installing Heloise and such companions as she chose in his old home. But the course of the story will reveal more clearly the deep affection he had for Heloise. It was faithfulness to the views he held since his conversion, faithfulness to the ideal of the best men of the time, as well as a dread of the ever ready tongue of the calumniator, that separated him so long and so sternly from her.
In 1129, therefore, the year in which the plague ravaged Paris, Abélard revisited the quiet valley of the Arduzon. Thither he invited Heloise and some of her companions, to whom he made over the legal possession of the estate. Poor Heloise must have been disappointed. The ardour which she reveals in her letters was evidently met by a great restraint and formality on his side. He was severely correct in the necessary intercourse with his ‘sisters in religion.’ Later events showed that, ridiculous as it may well seem, he had good reason for this deference to detractors. However, Heloise soon won universal regard and affection in Champagne. ‘The bishops came to love her as a daughter,’ says Abélard, ‘the abbots as a sister, and the laity as a mother.’ They lived in deep poverty and some anxiety at first, but nobles and prelates soon added generously to the resources of the new foundation. Noble dames, too, brought rich dowries with them in coming to ask for the veil in Heloise’s respected community. The priory grew rapidly in importance and good repute.
In 1131 Abélard sought a further favour for the new foundation, in having Heloise raised to the dignity of abbess. Innocent II. was making a journey through France, and lavishing favours (when they cost him nothing) generously and gratuitously on all sides, behaving in a manner that departed widely from papal traditions. It was the second year of the great papal schism, and, Anacletus having bought or otherwise secured Rome, through his family, the Pierleoni, Innocent was making a successful bid for France, where exception was taken to Pierleone’s Jewish strain. Passing from Chartres to Liége, on his way to meet Lothair of Saxony, Innocent spent a day or two at the Benedictine abbey of Morigni. Abélard joined the crowd of prelates who assembled there to do homage to the pope, and he obtained the promise of a bull (which was duly sent), conferring the dignity of abbess on Heloise, and securing to her and her successors the full canonical rights of their abbey. Abélard seems to have been received with distinction by the papal court. The chronicle of Morigni mentions the presence of the Abbot of St. Gildas, and adds: ‘the most distinguished teacher and master in the schools, to whom lovers of learning flocked from almost the whole of Christendom.’ Later, too, Abélard boasts (so says Bernard) of his friends amongst the Roman cardinals; it must have been during the stay of the papal court at Morigni that he met them. Another noteworthy personage whom Abélard met there was St. Bernard. We have no details about this first meeting of the two great antagonists, but their names occur side by side in the chronicle as those of the most eminent teacher and the most distinguished preacher in France.