According to these memoirs, Abelard was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years of age when he became enamoured of Eloisa, who was then sixteen or seventeen years old. He introduced himself into the household of the Canon Fulbert, was appointed professor to the young girl, and soon became domesticated in the family. Eloisa, becoming soon after pregnant, fled to Brittany, where she gave birth to a son. She afterwards returned to Paris, and after frequent negotiations between Fulbert and Abelard, the lovers were at length married, but the marriage was kept secret.
The rest is known. Abelard, fearfully mutilated, became a monk in the abbey of St. Denis, and at his bidding, to which she was ever entirely submissive, Eloisa took the veil in the convent of Argenteuil.
These events occupied about the space of two years, and bring us to 1118 or 1119.
In a council held in Paris ten years later (1129) a decree was passed expelling Eloisa and the other nuns from the convent of Argenteuil, which the Abbé Suger had claimed as being a dependance of the Abbaye de St. Denis.[23]
This expulsion coming to the ears of Abelard, he offered the nuns an asylum in the Paraclete, which he had lately founded, and which he soon after made over to them as a gift.
Pope Innocent II. confirmed this gift in 1131. Abelard speaks further, in his Historia Calamitatum, of events befalling a year later, and of his return to the abbey of St. Gildas. We see therefore that this memoir, written with much care and attention, cannot have been published before 1133, and perhaps even long after that. Abelard was then in his fifty-fourth year and Eloisa in her thirty-second or thirty-third. About fourteen years had elapsed since both had embraced the monastic life: in the meanwhile they had met and had spent more or less time together in the Paraclete between 1129 and 1132.
Let us now enquire if the subject matter contained in these seven letters, all of which were written after the latter date (a fact that should be carefully noted) agrees with that which has preceded.
The amorous correspondence of the lovers is confined to four letters. The first is written by Eloisa. She says, that if she writes to Abelard at all, it is that she has by accident seen the Historia Calamitatum; and in order to convince him that she has read it, she touches briefly on each circumstance recorded in it, every one of which must have been only too familiar to them both.
Does the reader think this a natural or a probable style of commencement? Does it not denote something artificial in the composition? Farther on she complains that Abelard has forsaken her: “her to whom the name of mistress was dearer than that of wife, however sacred this latter tie might be.”[24]
And finally she adds: “Only tell me if you can, why, since we have taken the monastic vows, which you alone desired, you have so neglected and forgotten me that I have neither been blessed by your presence nor consoled by a single letter in your absence. Answer me, I beseech you, if you can, or I may myself be tempted to tell you what I think, and what all the world suspects.”[25]