Philip determined to be reconciled to the Church. At a council held at the close of 1104 he appeared as a sincere penitent,--barefooted, with unkempt hair and beard,--and solemnly swore never to live with Bertrade again. The curse of excommunication was removed; the council discreetly went about its business; and Philip went outside, and put on his shoes, and had his hair cut, and put on his crown, and had one ready for Bertrade, too. But the Church was tired of contending with him, and took no further notice of his irregularities, though what happened soon afterward was, if possible, more scandalous than all that had gone before.
Bertrade had the address to reconcile her two husbands; and in 1106 she and Philip actually went to visit Foulques, in Angers, where all three hobnobbed most amicably, sitting at the same table, or occupying seats of honor in the church, with Philip seated by Bertrade's side and Foulques on a stool at her feet. One can hardly credit a statement like this, but there seems to have been no limit to Bertrade's effrontery, and the complete subjection of Foulques is recorded in the Latin life of Louis the Fat: "Although he was banished outright from her bed, she so mollified him that... often sitting on a stool at her feet, he submitted in all things to her will."
Foulques, though he sat at the feet of his wife and the king's paramour, and though he ceased to make active claim to his share of Bertrade, has recorded his and his wife's infamy for us. One of his charters, for example, is dated thus: "This donation was made in the year one thousand and ninety-five after the incarnation of Our Lord, Urban being Pope, and France befouled by the adultery of the infamous King Philip." But this was in the salad days of his wrath, before Bertrade had induced him to sit on a stool at her feet and submit to her will in all things.
In the year 1108, Philip, feeling his sins and his diseases lie heavy upon him, determined to take an allopathic dose of repentance to purify himself from the first before the second carried him off. He addressed special prayers to Saint Benedict, ordered that his wicked body should not be buried in the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, and clothed himself in the habit of a Benedictine monk. Thus he expired, having existed--not reigned--as king for forty-eight years, and was succeeded immediately by Louis the Fat, who was crowned within five days after the death of his father.
This haste was not altogether without excuse, for Bertrade was still alive, and not wasting her time in prayers to Saint Benedict. Taking advantage of the disturbed state of the kingdom, she managed to form a coalition, headed by her brother, Amauri de Montfort, and by the successor of her Angevin husband, to dethrone Louis and put in his place her own son, Philip, Count of Mantes. But Louis was too active to be caught as the conspirators had planned. He summoned Philip to appear before the court of peers of the duchy of France, and, on his refusal, seized upon the strongholds of his enemies before they were prepared, and deprived Philip of his county of Mantes.
Bertrade's last card was played, and she succumbed to her defeat. Though still in the height of her beauty, with not a wrinkle on her brow, she retired to the convent of Haute Bruyère, a dependency of the famous monastery of Fontevrault. Whether or not she was truly penitent for the evil life she had led we do not know. But there was to be short time left her for the cultivation of the monastic virtues; for the austerity of the new life soon wore her out, and she died in the convent.
CHAPTER II
FAMOUS LOVERS
In Père Lachaise, the famous cemetery of Paris, there is none among the hundreds of monuments upon which the traveller looks with more interest than that of the lovely and unhappy Héloïse. There her body lies, with that of her lover-husband, Pierre Abélard. It is her story that we wish to tell; but her fame and that of Abélard are so intimately associated that one cannot tell of Héloïse without first telling something of Abélard. The debt to fame, however, is not all on her side; to translate the words of a great French historian: "Alone, the name of Abélard would be known to-day only to scholars: linked with the name of Héloïse, it is in every heart. Paris, above all,... has kept the memory of the immortal daughter of the Cite with exceptional and unchanging fidelity. The eighteenth century and the Revolution, so pitiless towards the Middle Ages, revived this tradition with the same ardor which led them to destroy so many other memories. The children of Rousseau's disciples still go in pilgrimage to the monument of this great saint of love, and each spring sees pious women placing fresh crowns of flowers upon the tomb in which the Revolution reunited the two lovers." We shall not, therefore, attempt to part those whom love has for more than seven centuries joined together, and shall tell of Abélard as well as of Héloïse.