All Paris was startled, one morning, by the rumour of an extraordinary crime. A ruffian, armed with a razor, had broken into Maitre Pierre's house, at night, and had shamefully mutilated the teacher. It was true. Abélard was unsexed; and Fulbert, fully avenged, had fled from Paris. Loud was the lamentation in the Sainte Montagne.
The dominant feeling aroused by such a humiliation, in the mind of a man so proud as Abélard, was, naturally, that of shame; penitence took but a second place. He felt that he could face the world no longer; yet jealousy told him that he could not take the cowl, while another took Héloïse, and knew delights, spiritual and carnal, that had once been his. Héloïse, living only in and for her earthly husband, could refuse him nothing at such a crisis. She took the veil at Argenteuil, and became, for her lover's sake, the spouse of Christ. Abélard donned the robe of the Benedictines at the great abbey of St. Denis, in 1119.
If he had expected to regain peace and serenity in such a house, he must have been grievously disappointed. The abbey of St. Denis had not escaped the degeneracy that had already overtaken many of the monastic institutions of the day. It had become a centre of private and political intrigue, a pleasure resort for the fashionable life of Paris; laughter and the rustle of ladies' robes were heard in the long alleys of the cloister.[119] Against these abuses the new-comer was not slow to raise his eloquent voice. It was not heeded, or was received only with jeers. Abélard withdrew, by permission, to the monastery of Deuil, close by, where he opened a school, and gave himself up again to teaching, and to propagating the advanced theology that had already scandalized the more orthodox of Paris. His treatise on "The Divine Trinity and Unity," brought him before the Council of Soissons. The persecution of the freethinker had begun; and though the daring innovator endeavoured strenuously to justify his writings, the fathers condemned him to throw, with his own hands, his book into the lighted brazier prepared in the midst of the assembly. He was then handed over, for correction, to the care of the abbot of St. Médard de Soissons.
This sentence was soon annulled, and Abélard found himself once more at St. Denis. But not for long. Sleeping enmities were aroused; and, one night, Abélard, with the connivance of certain monks, fled secretly from the abbey, and took refuge near Nogent, in a remote part of Champagne, where he hoped "to avoid fame" and live secure against the malice of his enemies. But to avoid fame was not in the reformer's destiny. The hermit was soon surrounded by his followers, who converted a natural grotto into a chapel, and built themselves rustic huts of boughs and thatch, in this Paraclet,[120] the place of their master's consolation.
Again he re-opened his school, again many listened to his defence of the truth, again he aroused the enmity of the orthodox church, who, this time, had as their champion the greatest name in all Christendom, the more than Pope, St. Bernard. Abélard's four happy years of quiet service were at an end. He fled to the lonely abbey of St. Gildas, in Brittany, his native province, "a barbarous country, the language of which I do not understand," where his walks were along the inaccessible shore of a sea that was always stormy, where dissolute monks lived only to hunt, "and the doors and walls were without ornament, save the heads of wild boars and the feet of hinds and the hides of frightful animals."[121]
During all these years, though neither was forgotten by the other, no communication had passed between Abélard the monk and Héloïse the nun. Now, for a brief period, the currents of their lives were to mingle again. In the year 1128, the monastery of Argenteuil passed to the abbey of St. Denis, then ruled by Suger, who was no friend to Abélard. The nuns were dispersed, and Héloïse and her sisters found themselves without shelter. Here was the old lover's opportunity. Paraclet, bereft of its lord, had no tenants; Héloïse had no home. An impulse swiftly acted upon, some sudden instinct of pity, of desire, of remorse for the sufferings of which he was the responsible cause, led Abélard to obtain permission to offer her the shelter of his old retreat. She accepted this offer, and established there a nunnery, of which she herself was appointed to be the first abbess. Héloïse and her sisters were to follow the rigorous rule of St. Benedict, modified by Abélard—after special study—as a concession to the frail physique of women.
MAISON COLOMBIER BEAUNE
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