The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

By Peter Abelard and Heloise

The story of Abelard and Heloise is renowned as one of the most legendary and romantic love stories of all time. Peter Abelard was a French philosopher, theologian, and preeminent logician of the 12th Century. Heloise was an intelligent and remarkable girl eighteen years his junior, who resided in the house of her uncle. Entering into the house as Heloise’s tutor, Abelard soon seduced the young girl. The secret affair was discovered by the girl’s uncle, followed quickly by a pregnancy, secret marriage, and the castration of Abelard. The pair retreated separately to a monastery and abbey, to live out the rest of their days in religious confinement. These letters are the best evidence of what transpired between the lovers after their separation, despite some speculation as to their true authorship. Powerfully written, these letters have resonated with readers for eight centuries as a standard of romantic love and devotion. This edition follows the first complete translation in English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and includes the prefatory letter to George Moore and his response included in that publication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jan 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781420981612

Peter Abelard

Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholar, philosopher, theologian, and teacher. Born into a noble family, Abelard was able to pursue a comprehensive education. As his father, a respected knight, requested, Abelard focused on a liberal arts education, and eventually set up his own school near Paris. He was a respected scholar in his time, and was well-known for his philosophy.

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THE LETTERS OF

ABELARD AND HELOISE

By ABELARD and HELOISE

Translated by

C. K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

By Abelard and Heloise

Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-8160-5

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-8161-2

This edition copyright © 2022. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of Abelard and Heloise on a terrace, by Charles Lock Eastlake / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

A Letter to George Moore by the Translator

A Letter to the Translator in Response

The First Letter

The Second Letter

The Third Letter

The Fourth Letter

The Fifth Letter

The Sixth Letter

The Seventh Letter

The Eighth Letter

A Letter to George Moore by the Translator

My dear George Moore,

It would obviously be impossible for any translation of these Letters to be published in England without some reference, whether by dedication or otherwise, to the one man using our language who has taken the matter up within living memory, and the only man who at any time has made the dry bones of ABELARD and HELOISE reincarnate themselves in a far livelier garment of romantic flesh, I fancy, than was ever theirs in their twelfth century existence: but there is an especial reason why I must dedicate this translation to you, as, although I hasten to acquit you of any responsibility for the actual volume, it was over your table in Ebury Street that I had it suggested to me, for the first and (I would now wager) the last time, that I might write a book—one of the literary-historical kind—about the cloistered lovers and their correspondence.

What you told me then, had the speaker been any but yourself, must have fallen upon deaf ears; for, to tell the truth, I had never read the Letters, I had no intention of reading them, and I assumed that their problems were sufficiently well-known already to persons less illiterate than myself: but I do remember your telling me that the First Letter was, in your opinion, from the hand of Jean de Meung, a literary forgery, designed to create a background and a justification for the rest. You then knocked down the whole card castle by reminding (you were really informing) me that the whole of the evidence for the story of the lovers was contained in this First Letter, as indeed the whole compass of your own marvellous romance is contained in the period before Heloise went to Paraclete, that is a year at least before even the First Letter purports to have been written. But you did not then tell me, of what I discovered only after Mr. Chapman had coerced me into undertaking this version, of a far greater and more impudent forgery, the English translation (still on sale) of the Letters published some two hundred years ago. Whether this work was forged in England, or, as seems to me likely, is translated from a French forgery of the late seventeenth century, I have no means, here in Pisa, of discovering. It consists of six letters, the first of them, entitled Abelard to Philintus, following more or less the lines of the History of the Calamities, though with such startling interpolations as the following:

"I was infinitely perplexed what course to take; at last I applied myself to Heloise’s singing master. The shining metal, which had no effect on Agaton, charmed him: he was excellently qualified for conveying a billet with the greatest dexterity and secrecy. He delivered one of mine to Heloise, who, according to my appointment, met me at the end of the garden, I having scaled the wall with a ladder of ropes. I confess to you all my failings, Philintus; how would my enemies, Champeaux and Anselm, have triumphed, had they seen this redoubted philosopher in such a wretched condition. Well! I met my soul’s joy—my Heloise! I shall not transcribe our transports, they were not long, for the first news Heloise acquainted me with plunged me into a thousand distractions. A floating Delos was to be sought for, where she might be safely delivered of a burden she began already to feel. Without losing much time in debating, I made her presently quit the Canon’s house and at break of day depart for Brittany; where she, like another goddess, gave the world another Apollo, which my sister took care of."

Of this specimen of twelfth century literature its most recent editor (a lady who seems not to have studied the inside of the Latin volume) writes: Of course the authenticity of the letters has been questioned, but no human being can read them and not know them to be genuine.

This may not seem a very serious matter, but it is serious in this respect, that people who have read only the traditional English version of the Letters must have formed a wholly different conception of the character of the lovers from theirs who have studied, however casually, the Latin text. The former kind will be surprised to learn that Abelard did not inspire a hopeless passion in Heloise’s maid, already courted as she was by a rich abbot and a courtier, to say nothing of a young officer; that he never said: Pyramus and Thisbe’s discovery of the crack in the wall was but a slight representation of our love and its sagacity; and that the irregularities of conventual life at Paraclete did not oblige Heloise to write: I walk my rounds every night and make those I catch abroad return to their chambers; for I remember all the adventures that happened in the monasteries near Paris.

But let us return to the question of the First Letter, which you regard, you tell me, as a piece of book making, and of the Second, which you say was certainly touched to make it fit on. It seems to me that here there are two things to be said: first, that if the Letter to a Friend be a forgery, it is a remarkably clever impersonation on the forger’s part of Abelard as he reveals himself in the later Letters. Only the irrepressible young prig who insisted on lecturing impromptu upon the interpretation of Ezekiel, and expected his better instructed seniors then to sit under him, could have grown into the intolerable old egoist who could write to his wife (in the Fifth Letter) of his own emasculation: Neither grieve that thou wert the cause of so great a good, for which thou needst not doubt that thou wert principally created by God. And what artistry to make him seek to comfort his friend in an unnamed affliction by writing exclusively about his own affairs. On the other hand, it was careless on the forger’s part, if he composed the First Letter, having already the text of the other seven to his hand, to make Abelard say that he had frequently visited Heloise and her companions at Paraclete, when Heloise’s chief ground of complaint against her husband, and one that he admits to be valid in the opening lines of the Third Letter, is that he has never come to see her since their conversion.

Then you made the point, in writing to me, that there was, or had been, some obscurity in the public mind as to the reason for Abelard’s sending Heloise back to Argenteuil after their marriage. But as to this, I think, he makes himself clear enough in the First, and again in the Fifth Letters. He first offered to marry Heloise, in order to pacify her uncle. He married her, against her will and advice, but, as he thought always of his own interests only, made her keep their marriage secret, so that his career as a teacher and potential churchman might not be jeopardised. The uncle, unfortunately, makes the fact of the marriage known; Heloise denies it; the uncle maltreats her; Abelard removes her from his custody and sends her back, as a pensionnaire, to Argenteuil. He has no thought, however, of breaking off his relations with her, and in the Fifth Letter reminds her how those relations were resumed (uncomfortably enough, one would think, not to say sacrilegiously) in the refectory at Argenteuil. The uncle, however, whose sole and very natural motive is hatred of Abelard, concludes that he is putting away his wife with the intention of himself also seeking orders, and takes the one step, short of murder, which must make it impossible for Abelard ever to be admitted to the priesthood. From this point, our hero’s life may be summed up in the poignant words of the fair-complexioned man in Candide: O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni!

There is an inevitable change in his nature. First of all, his whole affection, which seems never to have deserved a politer name than lust, for Heloise abruptly ceases. As her husband, he compels her to take the veil at Argenteuil before he himself retires to the Abbey of Saint-Denis. And when, in later years, she writes him her three immortal letters, his irritation and boredom are manifest in every line of his replies. In his final letter, when dealing with the use of wine in convents, he actually transcribes several pages of her previous letter to him, as though forgetting that it was she who had written them. In his other relations also, his character is enfeebled. True, the young prig who lectured his seniors upon Ezekiel survives in the middle-aged prig (how curiously like certain Anglican prelates of to-day) who points out to his fellow monks of Saint-Denis that their founder may not, after all, have been the Areopagite; but the young cocksure who confuted William of Champeau and laughed in the venerable beard of Anselm has dwindled into a querulous craven, constantly in terror of persecution, poison and the rest, magnifying his dangers with a buoyant indifference to his correspondent’s natural anxiety, and piteously appealing to her for an eventual Christian burial. His once famous teaching, too, has become a string of garrulous quotations, many of them singularly inept.

There is nothing more to be said, except that the lovers, I find, owe some part, at least, of their reputation in our Island to the assumption that they were never legally married; a British spinster, resident for many years in the Antipodes, to whom I was speaking recently about the Letters, was genuinely shocked to learn that their writers repose beneath the same covering in Père Lachaise. When I assured her that, before burial, they had been man and wife, her face fell still farther. But the great majority of people in England think, if they think about the matter at all, that Abelard and Heloise are fictional characters invented, my dear George Moore, and very beneficially invented by yourself. This volume will, as I need not assure you, do little or nothing to dispel their illusion, or to diminish the reputation of Heloise and Abelard. Such as it is, pray accept the offering of my part in it, with every good wish, upon this your onomastico,

From

Charles Scott Moncrieff.

Lung’arno Regio, Pisa.

Saint George’s Day, 1925.

A Letter to the Translator in Response

My dear Moncrieff,

You have done me a great honour in placing my name on the front page of your translation of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, and that my long prose narrative should have led you to the task is a flattery agreeable as any that comes to the lot of a man of letters. I can think of nothing pleasanter than to write you a long letter about the spirit and style of your translation; and this I would certainly do if my time were at my own disposal (if I were not going to France at the end of the week), and if you had not unfortunately reminded me that some years ago I looked upon the First Letter as: A literary forgery, designed to create a background and a justification for the rest. I may have said: There are some pages in the First Letter that bear witness to the hand of an editor, and called your attention to the change in the narrative from an almost unaffected account of the writer’s own life to the strained, rhetorical style of a student in rhetoric bidden to write a theme on the feelings of a man gelt in the dead of night by ruffians that a bribed servant let into the house. In my opinion, pages sixteen and seventeen are an interpolation; but two pages of falsehood do not render worthless sixty pages of truthful narrative, and the story that Abelard tells of how he gave away his patrimony to his brothers and sisters so that he might be free to preach his doctrine that all Christianity may be discovered in human reason, and how after many wanderings he came to live in Canon Fulbert’s house in the rue des Chantres, is no doubt true in substance and fact, though perhaps not quite true in spirit; for Abelard at times seems to take pleasure in exhibiting himself in an ugly light—so do we try to explain away some harshness of expression when we read the Letter to a Friend for the first time. The journey to Brittany which he undertook because he feared assassination (this is my conjecture) is truthfully related, and so is Heloise’s passionate revolt against their marriage; marriage she cries will enlist her in the miserable band of women whose names come down to us for no better reason than that they have brought about the ruin of great men, and she tells the uttermost of her soul to all but those whose perceptions are stinted to tricks of style, literary mannerisms and the like. Abelard reports her outcry, may be with afterthoughts, but he did not invent Heloise’s lamentation lest any deed or word of hers should tarnish a man’s glory in the world. I have not got the exact wording and am too pressed by circumstance to seek it out, but the thought behind is part of Heloise’s nature. She reveals herself in her words as Brunnhilde in her motif. Sighing vehemently and weeping, she brought her exhortation to an end in this manner. One thing, she said, remains to the last, that after the ruin of us both our suffering may be no less than the love before it. Nor in this speech, as the whole world was to know, was the spirit of prophecy lacking. And so, commending our infant son to my sister, we returned privily to Paris, and a few days later, having kept secret vigils of prayer by night in a certain church, there at the point of dawn, in the presence of her uncle and divers of our own and his friends, we were plighted together by the nuptial benediction. Presently we withdrew privily apart, nor did we see each other afterwards save seldom and by stealth, concealing as far as possible what we had done. Her uncle, however, and his servants, seeking a solace for their ignominy, began to divulge the marriage that had been celebrated, and to break the promise they had given me on that head. But she began to anathematise to the contrary, and to swear that their story was altogether false. Whereby he being vehemently moved began to visit her with frequent contumely. On learning of this I removed her to a certain Abbey of nuns near Paris, which is called Argenteuil, where she herself as a young girl had been bred up and schooled. The garments also of religion, which befitted the monastic profession, except the veil, I had fashioned for her and put them on her.

The last sentence seems to imply a sort of dress rehearsal in his lodging before they started for the convent, and the words: I removed her, present the picture of a butcher leading a lamb from the field to the slaughter-house. Even in the convent of Argenteuil, which was eventually suppressed because of the irregular life of the nuns, some formalities would have to be observed. Heloise was a married woman who had a child, and the married could take Orders only by signing a bond of separation in the presence of witnesses. The presence of the Archbishop of Paris would be solicited and he would not fail to remember that the interest of the Church would be ill served by allowing Abelard to rid himself of his wife. On turning to your translation again, I read: Plunged in so wretched a contrition, it was the confusion of shame, I confess, rather than the devotion of conversion that drove me to the retirement of a monastic cloister. She, moreover, had already at my command willingly taken the veil and entered a convent. A search for the date she entered the convent of Argenteuil was made during the composition of Heloise and Abelard, and I wrote convinced that a couple of weeks was the longest time that could altogether be allowed between Heloise’s return to the convent and Abelard’s mutilation, but now, some years having passed over, I cannot give my reasons; it may be that I relied altogether on the text (which seems to point to a couple of weeks) and on a sentence in the Fifth Letter telling that after taking her to the convent he saw her but once, mentioning the fact with shame, for it was on that day he persuaded her into the refectory to sin with him once again. So I am unable to account for the day described in the Letter to a Friend, when Heloise broke out, as best she could amid her tears and sobs, into the famous complaint of Cornelia:

Great husband, undeserving of my bed!

What right had I to bow so lofty a head?

Why, impious female, did I marry thee,

To cause thy hurt? Accept the penalty

That of my own free will I’ll undergo. . . .

But Abelard was lying on a bed of sickness when she hastened to the altar and straightway, before the Bishop, took the blessed veil from the altar and publicly bound herself to the monastic profession, and Heloise did not see him again till the suppression of the convent of Argenteuil brought him from Saint Gildas to rescue her and three or four other outcast nuns from begging in the streets of Paris. Out of Paris five rode together to Troyes, where some devoted followers had built an oratory for Abelard, which he had dedicated to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, instead of to the Holy Trinity or to the Father and the Son, as was then and perhaps still is customary. It would seem that a separate mention of the Holy Ghost troubled the conscience of the time, and Abelard, dreading another trial for heresy, accepted the appointment of Abbot of Saint Gildas, the ruins of which still remain, grim rocks overhanging the ocean, a desolate region, truly, where savage monks—so do we read in the First Letter—tried to rid themselves of their too austere Abbot by putting poison in the chalice—an addition that we may attribute to an editor, and to one without knowledge that an Abbot need not be a priest, a strange ignorance, for Abelard’s story was known to everybody, and the scribe must have been aware that no bishop would ordain a man suspected of heresy. But to continue. Abelard had fled to Saint Gildas, but the Paraclete remained his property, and he was free to dispose of it as it pleased him. Heloise became its Prioress in eleven hundred and twenty-nine and those who have examined the documents, the Church chronicles and such like, aver that they have been unable to find any allusion to private meetings; a private interview between the two would have been painful to both, more to Abelard than to Heloise, for, as the correspondence that began two or three years later testifies, the sight of Abelard awoke in Heloise passions that ten years of conventual life had been unable to subdue. Her first letter to him begins: Your letter addressed to a friend for his comfort was lately brought to me by chance. By chance! she must have known of his mutilation when they rode to Troyes. The first paragraph of her letter is therefore another interpolation, and almost justifies the words which you tell me I spoke across my hearth-rug to you one evening: A literary forgery, designed to create a background and a justification for the rest. But with the exception of this first paragraph the letter seems to me genuine. Heloise’s passionate avowals could have been written by nobody but herself or Saint Teresa—women bring more heat into their literature than men, and nobody, not even Sappho herself, has declared her body’s lust more openly than Heloise, and without provocation, for Abelard, though he answered with tenderness and affection, answered, as may be easily imagined, with a coldness that succeeded in bringing Heloise into an understanding that the past is for ever past; and reading her last letter we follow the woman’s struggles and appreciate her noble determination to forget the past—no, not to forget it, but to look upon the past as the past and to love the spiritual man that God sent to redeem the world from the tyranny of the Church.

In our thoughts we can all hear him say to Heloise: My hope is to give to man the right to love God in his own soul, and that is why I teach that Christianity can be discovered in human reason: a doctrine that was deemed dangerous in the twelfth century, but became acceptable a century later when Saint Thomas Aquinas made it the central point of his religious system, about which all other thoughts circled, returned and rallied to combat heresies and establish the Church on better foundations than mere legend and affirmations. I do not know whether Saint Thomas accepted the corollary that every man is entitled to seek the truth for himself. If he didn’t Newman did, carrying the argument a step further: pleading that a man’s conscience is the touchstone whereby all things may be tested. He must have often said, he may have written, that man is dependent more on his conscience than upon any church, for he was a Protestant born, and the soul that we bring into the world lives its own unchanging life in the midst of change. Thoughts return, as certainly as the mallows in the garden, to bloom another year. We owe our Protestant conscience to Abelard; he is in you and in me when we are truly ourselves; and my thoughts, passing from Abelard to his first English translator, ask why you write so lightly about one who is still ourselves, and why in your lightness you even cast any opprobrious epithet that your pen suggests, and of all why you write that his whole affection for Heloise deserves no politer name than lust. When you wrote these words you must have forgotten the old saw that man is half angel half beast, and if the old saw speaks the truth, lust is essential in every love story. Without lust there can be no love story, either on the man’s side or the woman’s, and it goes without saying that affection, sympathy, devotion and understanding are needed to complete a love story. And in what love story, I would ask, are these qualities more apparent than in the story of Abelard and Heloise? I would contest your reading of the letters at almost every point. If you are right and the love story of Abelard and Heloise be no more than a lewd incident in the social history of the middle ages, you will have to concede that many poets, philosophers and historians were led astray. To find tales of lust racier and more varied they had only to look round the corner of the rue de Coupe-Gueule, rue du Gros-Pet, rue de la Grande Truanderie, rue du Pet, rue Méderal, rue du Cul-de-Pet, rue Pute-y-Muce, rue Coup-de-Bâton, rue Prise-Miche, rue de Trou-Punaise, rue Tire-Pet, rue du Petit-Pet, and if your contention be that the poets, philosophers and historians were lured to the story by a religious erethism, my answer will be that a story is retained in human memory only for the sake of some eternal beauty or heroism—men that have suffered and died for their ideas quickly pass into glory and legend. The names of Prometheus and Jesus occur at once to all men, but rarely the name of Abelard, of whom little is remembered except the mutilation of his body, which he himself looked upon as the smallest part of the cruelty he endured. Very few even in France could give any small account of his flight to the desolate region of the Arduzon with one disciple, an Englishman, and their life in a wattled hut, of the abominable Bernard and Abelard’s flight from him. He was harried and hunted to death, this first Protestant, the precursor of Huss and Luther, without exciting the world’s pity, which is strange, for eight hundred years usually bring a man’s worth into clearer recognition than was possible whilst he lived in a passion-clouded present. But eight hundred years have done little or nothing to remove England’s attitude of stiff reserve towards a man to whom we owe our Protestantism, and that is why I formally invite a reconsideration of pages sixteen and seventeen, certain that all possessed of any faintest literary intuition will discover the forger in them—the clumsiest of all forgers and the most successful, one who after providing Heloise with a quotation from Lucan to bring her up the altar steps, left her to reveal her great energetic nature in her letters, concerning himself only with the linking of the First and Second Letters together with such an inept sentence as might be found in any Drury Lane drama. A strange and interesting story lies hidden in these pages, and we would discover if we could whether the forger was an ecclesiastic who wished to blacken Abelard’s character, or Jean de Meung, a well intentioned young poet who wished to exhibit Heloise in a repentant mood. Repentant women were popular in the Middle Ages; indeed, they are still, so I am told. It would seem that everybody except myself likes repentant women.

I owe to Jean de Meung or to a priest living at the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century the fine gestures and scenical orations that Heloise pronounced, with a quotation from Lucan’s Pharsalia, before taking the veil from the altar, for it was these and her melodramatic sobs and tears that saved the story for eight hundred years from poetry, reserving it for my nineteenth century prose. Pope sniffed at it in a couple of hundred lines. I, too, sniffed, and for many years turned away wistfully, till at last it befell me to learn what really happened when Heloise visited Abelard by night in his lodging and demanded his protection.

Our assignations with the Muse are never the same. Rousseau tells that he met his Muse whilst walking, Wordsworth that she lay with him under double blankets; mine seeks me in my bath. Thou failest to understand, she said to me, how a great, energetic nature could have been changed into a sheep. The change that affrights thee never came to pass. The Heloise that we knew in Brittany visited Abelard in his lodging, saying: Abelard, all I told thee in Brittany has come true, and Abelard answered: I know it; my lectures are no longer so well attended as they were. I prophesied, she continued, that our marriage would bring ruin upon us both and I have come to ask thee to undo this fatal marriage. Thy father and mother separated at the end of their lives, one going to a convent and the other to a monastery; we should do as they did and lose no time in doing it. To lose each other for ever! he answered. As a priest, she replied, thy visits to Argenteuil will not be questioned, and by seeing each other only at intervals we shall love each other all our lives till we have no longer need of love, if such a time comes even to the old. . . . A beautiful story, I answered, O Muse, but answer me this, I pray: Shall I tell Abelard, with Heloise for a companion, or Heloise, with Abelard for a companion? I know not how to choose between the stories; both entice me; either seems a losing; yet a choice must be made. As my Muse did not answer, I began to run the two stories over in my mind, and when I stepped out of the bath she was no longer sitting on the mahogany rim; and eighteen months were spent writing the book that pleases you tormented all the while by remembrances of Abelard on the banks of the Arduzon and in the monastery built on the rocks round which the Atlantic surges, never certain which was the better story, Heloise and Abelard, or Abelard and Heloise. Every time I bathe I swear to you, my dear Moncrieff, that I beseech audience of my Muse. Once and