“Analyze the great love story of that era and you find rather a tragedy of tyranny. It runs thus: About the close of the Dark Ages the parents of Pierre Abelard decided, for the future repose of their souls, to repress all their natural desires and shift all mundane duties. Accordingly they retired to separate convents, leaving their son free to follow his natural bent. Argument being his ruling passion, he wandered through France challenging the local theologians in debate, always drawing a following, always making powerful enemies, and, doubtless, very much enjoying the life. At Laon he tackled the great Anselm, and finding him a man ‘of mean genius and great fluency of words without sense,’ Abelard conceived the idea of reading the Bible for himself. Then he made his way to Paris to break a lance with the great Canon Fulbert, where he met the Canon’s niece, Heloise. A love story ensued, like other love stories in many ways, except that Heloise, against all self-interest, physical, social, spiritual, refused to marry her lover, entreat as he might; she would do anything else for him, except state her true reason—but yet a woman. We have it finally in her correspondence, ‘What an injury shall I do the Church if I rob it of such a man!’
“Is it a sacrifice on the altar of the Church on her part, or is it a woman’s sacrifice for the interests of the man she loves better than herself? Had her mother made a like renunciation? No mother appears in the story of this adopted niece of an ecclesiastic. Here is Heloise’s position. In her time the only opening for a clever man was the Church with its conditions; a loving woman should not hamper an ambitious man; she should remember she cannot be to him what he is to her, which is a law of life known to woman, that we find holds true here. Having first given her all to the Church, she enters a convent at Abelard’s suggestion. But in the twelfth century, or any other, the hope of youth dies hard. Heloise does not take the black veil. She cannot burn her ships.
“Thereafter this truly fair woman of Romance figures as a stern disciplinarian reporting the weaker sisters. But she is severe upon herself as well, and confesses having unlawfully opened a letter in which she was sure there was news of her Abelard; though, when in after years Abelard wished to correspond with her, she begged him not. This is the tragedy of Heloise.
“Abelard also entered a convent, but there, as elsewhere, he had a wonderful faculty for carrying his point, and probably led, on the whole, a very congenial life. However, he once overstepped himself, and was summoned to appear before the Council of Soissons and commanded to burn his own book with his own hands. He ungallantly admitted that this was the saddest moment of his life. Here is Abelard’s tragedy. He felt that all was lost. But it was Abelard that the world needed, not his book.
“Brave as Socrates, Abelard returned to the Abbey of Saint Denis, there to raise the first historic doubt. He did not think Saint Denis was the Areopagite of the Scriptures, nor did he believe the saint was ever in Paris. The horrified Abbot accordingly gave Abelard over to the civil authorities ‘for reflections upon the kingdom and the crown.’
“Driven from Paris, he retired to a cloistered order at Troyes, where he built a church and had the pleasure of dedicating it to the Holy Ghost (there being a law against dedicating a temple to the Paraclete). Arguing to the last, Abelard passed away, and while his body was mouldering in the ground, his soul went arguing on in his intellectual descendants, the mediæval schoolmen who, in their poor way, managed to awaken the mind of Europe, if only to lead it by labyrinths into a cul-de-sac.
“I wonder if Heloise was able to follow her true love’s valiant career without earthly pride? Or by some strange austere resolve did she deny herself that gentle pleasure? For Heloise belongs to the species, omnipotent woman, who carries out her decisions by hook or by crook for the benefit of self and others, never hampered by a doubt of the ultimate excellence of her arrangements.
“Did she do well not to rob the Church of Abelard? Perhaps she builded better than she knew, or she may have made a sad mistake, but God knows, she did her best. That was eight hundred years ago, but her story is tragic today. As to Abelard’s, it is really very interesting.
“And,” continues History, “the favorite romance of this sadly submissive age was ‘The Patient Griselda.’ It was an old, old tale when Boccaccio told it, but, thank fortune, it is dead at last, for we cannot now conceive of the excellence of the heroine.
“A marquis, whose only love is the chase, is forced by his subjects to marry. He compromises on a little country girl, and requires her to promise ‘to study to please him and not to be uneasy at anything whatever he may do or say.’ (A man’s requirements, only this marquis wasn’t a gentleman.) To test her patience, he amuses himself by taking her children from her, one by one, and leading her to suppose that they have been killed, because his people objected to the descendants of a peasant. Griselda blesses her children as she delivers them to his servitor, saying: