It is pleasant to read his letters, after one has become convinced that the man really loved Héloïse; then, one finds in them gentleness and consideration for her feelings. With patience and adroitness, he answers the questions she asks, distracts her thoughts, still too much intent on him, and works out for her an elaborate scheme of government for use in the Paraclete; and one can understand that this, if anything, would have been a consolation to Héloïse, to feel that the whole tenor of her life was regulated by the affectionate legislation of the man whom she had loved.
About the love of Héloïse we need not hesitate. "Truly, she did love him," says the old chronicler of Saint Martin de Tours, and the ages since have been but echoing this. We must try, however, to form some more definite idea of the personality of one who is perhaps the greatest figure in an actual romance that the world has known. Of her beauty there can be no question; but we neither know nor very greatly care whether she was tall and dark or slender and fair. Probably we should be safe in assuming, on general principles, that she was a blonde, since the predilection for that style of beauty was so strong that Saint Bernard devotes a whole sermon to proving that there is no contradiction in the statement in the Song of Songs: "I am black, but comely." The most remarkable thing about her was her learning. Even when Abélard first met her, she was "most distinguished for the extent of her learning,"... "in great renown throughout the kingdom" for her proficiency. Her knowledge included not only Latin, but Greek and even Hebrew, both rarely understood even among men in a day when men usually got all and women none of the education that could be had. Her monastery at the Paraclete became a school as famous in its way as Abélard had made Paris.
Of another trait in her character, too, we can speak with certainty. Together with her learning went firmness of judgment and perfect sanity, the elements which go to make up what we vaguely call character. We have seen Abélard expressing his confidence in her wisdom and judgment. Saint Bernard, the bitter enemy of Abélard, could not withhold his admiration from her, although she herself, a faithful partisan of her husband, always spoke of Saint Bernard as "the false Apostle." The latter, as was natural in a man renowned for intellect and for asceticism, was more struck by the grandeur of her character than moved by her personal charms, and he wrote a letter to the Pope, commending her as a prioress, in a tone of lofty esteem rather than sympathy. Her own conduct, we have remarked, was above reproach, and her convent was so well governed that its rule became the standard for all the convents of her day. Whatever may have been the violence of her grief over the separation from Abélard, she was too proud to expose her feelings to the world. She lived on bravely, honorably, respected by high and low, yet making no secret of the fact that she had loved and still did love Abélard. One does not wonder that she won the popular fame which has kept her name alive, and which has fixed the epithet applied by Villon some three centuries later: La très-sage Héloïse. In all the happy phrases of the Ballade des Belles Dames du Temps Jadis there is no juster epithet.
In striking contrast to the brutal selfishness of Abélard is the noble disinterestedness and complete effacement of self seen in the conduct of Héloïse. Realizing that with him success in his vocation is everything and love but an episode, she is content. More than this, she does everything in her power to make him sacrifice her for the sake of the career which she knows he is bent upon. She flatters him, feeds his vanity, already overgreat, and consistently keeps out of view her own woman's feelings. When Abélard, with what he considers unusual and exemplary generosity, offers to marry her--one can fancy that he was not very urgent--this is part of the argument she uses to dissuade him: "She asked," says Abélard, "what atonement would not the world have a right to require of her should she deprive it of such a light? What curses she would call upon her head! What a loss this marriage would be to the Church! What tears it would cost philosophy! Would it not be an unseemly and deplorable thing to see a man whom nature had created for the whole world made the slave of one woman?... The marriage would be a shame and a burden to me... What agreement could there be between the labor of the school and the cares of a house, between the desk and the cradle?... Is there a man who, devoted to the meditations of philosophy or to the study of the Scriptures, could endure the cries of a child, the singing of the nurse as she put it to sleep, the continual coming and going of the servants, the incessant worries of young children?"
That Abélard has reported her arguments with accuracy we need not doubt when we come upon this remarkable and often quoted passage in her first letter: "I never thought... of my own wishes; it was always yours, you know yourself, that my heart was bent upon satisfying. Although the name of wife seems both more sacred and more enduring, I should have preferred that of mistress, or even concubine... thinking that, the more humble I made myself for your sake, the more right I should have to your favor, and the less stain I should put upon the brilliancy of your glory."
When their misfortunes came upon them and Abélard wanted her to enter the cloister she obeyed without complaint; but the truth comes out at the close of her first letter: "When you entered the service of God, I followed, nay, I preceded you... You made me first take the veil and the vows, you chained me to God before yourself. This mistrust, the only lack of confidence in me you ever showed, filled me with grief and shame, me, who would, God knows, have followed you or have gone before you unhesitatingly into the very flames of hell! For my heart was no longer with me but with you." In this letter are the only things that even look like reproaches on her part; she complains of his not writing to her, of his grudging her even the poor consolation of a letter, when she had done all for him: "Only tell me, if you can, why, since the retirement from the world which you yourself enjoined upon me, you have neglected me. Tell me, I say, or I will say what I think, and what is on everybody's lips. Ah! it was lust rather than love which attracted you to me... and that is why, your desire once satisfied, all demonstrations of affection ceased with the desire which inspired them." She implores him, therefore, to write and silence these disquieting voices in her heart.
There was no hypocrisy in Héloïse; she never was resigned to her seclusion in the convent, and never pretended to be. She wrote to Abélard that she was continuing to live in the convent only to obey him, "for it was not love of God, but your wish, your wish alone which cast my youth into the midst of monastic austerities." From the very monastery of which she was prioress she writes her burning letters. The first is superscribed: Domino suo, imo patri, conjugi suo, imo fratri; ancilla sua, imo filia; ipsius uxor, imo soror; Abélardo Heloissa: "To her lord, nay, to her father; to her husband, nay, to her brother; his servant, nay, his daughter; his wife, nay, his sister; to Abélard, Héloïse." She seems to lack words to voice the passionate devotion of her heart, and comes at the last to the best and simplest, a veritable cry of the heart it is To Abélard, Héloïse. Even in the letters subsequent to Abélard's patient endeavor to allay the transports of devotion to a mere man in one who had vowed her life to Christ, she does not restrain her feelings entirely. She superscribes them: "To him who is all for her after Christ, she who is all for him in Christ," and finally, "To her sovereign master, his devoted slave." It is true that the passion is more under control, but it is there nevertheless; for in one of these letters she ever and anon addresses Abélard as "my greatest blessing," and deliberately says: "Under all circumstances, God knows, I have feared offending you more than I have feared offending Him; and it is you far more than God whom I wish to please; it was a word from you, no divine call, that made me take the veil." And she says, in reply to Abélard's request to be buried in the cemetery of the Paraclete: "I shall be more intent on following you without delay than upon providing for your burial."
Bigotry or narrow piety, which are so much alike as to be scarcely distinguishable, might find fault with the uncompromising frankness of Héloïse in confessing the persistence of love after she is a nun. She admits that she loved Abélard passionately; moreover: "If I must indeed lay bare all the weakness of my miserable heart, I do not find in my heart contrition or penitence sufficient to appease God. I cannot withhold myself from complaining of His pitiless cruelty in regard to the outrage inflicted on you, and I only offend Him by rebellious murmurings against His decrees, instead of seeking to allay His wrath by repentance. Can it be said, in fact, that one is truly penitent, whatever be the bodily penances submitted to, when the soul still harbors the thought of sin and burns with the same passions as of old?" She cannot bring herself to regret or even to forget and to cease to long for the pleasures of their love. "They praise me for purity of life; it is only because they do not know of my hypocrisy. The purity of the flesh is set down to the credit of virtue; but true virtue is of the soul, not of the body." These confessions, it strikes us, are proof of the purity and loftiness of her ideals; she will not accept credit for virtues that are only skin deep; she honors the robe she wears too much to soil it by any sort of indulgence that might give occasion for scandal or for irreverent scoffing. But she bravely owns: "I do not seek the crown of victory (over my evil thoughts), it is enough for me to avoid the danger."
In a person so honest with herself we are not surprised to find a charity for the weaknesses of others and a catholicity of view in regard to things moral and religious quite in advance of the rather cramped asceticism distinctive, for example, of Saint Bernard, whom we take as a typical representative of the religious feeling of the age. In the last of her letters, she shows her learning, it must be admitted, with a little too much pedantry; but that was in accord with the habit of the day. She overloads her letter with useless erudition in the way of appeals to this and that holy man or this and that text of Scripture to support a point which the reader would accept as axiomatic. But behind this there is good sense and kindness. She asks Abélard to determine, in the rule he is to make for her convent, all sorts of practical points. Can women, being physically weaker, fast as rigidly as men? Yet meat is not so necessary for women; is it really a deprivation, then, to make them abstain from meat? Women are not so prone to intemperance as men, and at times they really need some stimulant; how shall we determine in regard to wines? We should avoid, of course, male visitors; but do not vain, gossiping, worldly women corrupt their own sex just as much as men would? Above all, she says, nuns must learn to eschew Pharisaism, the better-than-thou frame of mind. "The blessings promised us by Christ were not promised to those alone who were priests; woe unto the world, indeed, if all that deserved the name of virtue were shut up in a cloister."
The close of this last letter is in a tone of religious exaltation which but poorly conceals the more human sentiments of the noble Abbess Héloïse: "It is for thee, O my master, it is for thee, as long as thou livest, to institute the rule which we are to follow evermore. For, after God, thou wast the founder of our community; it is for thee, then, with God's assistance, to legislate for our order."