Stealing Heaven (63 page)

"A nap, lady." His eyes twinkled wearily.

"Then I'll see you at supper. Sleep well." Turning away, she heard him call her name. When she swung around to look back, he was pulling from his girdle a packet tied with string.

He murmured, "These were in Master Peter's chest when he died. Perchance you want them."

"Thank you." She glanced down at the packet, startled to see her own nunnish handwriting.
Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys.
Abelard had saved her letters.

Hurrying across the cloister, she pushed a door and followed the corridor into her room. She went straight to the corner and loosened a stone, and from the niche she drew out a small locked box. Hesitating, she held the box in one hand, the letters in the other. She should burn them; it was madness to keep those incriminating pages, so full of her despair and unspeakable longings.

After a moment, she turned and went to her table. The stool was gone, and in its place someone had left Abelard's chair. Smiling, she sank down very slowly on the seat and set the letters and the box on the table. Tomorrow was time enough; tomorrow she would destroy the letters, hers and perhaps Abelard's as well. She rested her cheek against the coolness of the chair's carvings. A dying sun sprayed rays of fire across the table.

 

 

 

May 16, 1163

 

 

It was past compline now
, and the nuns were coming back from chapel. The stars had gone behind some clouds, and there were shadows all across the sky; the infirmary room seemed to have grown brighter and smaller. Heloise writhed her head to the side and watched Father William as he opened a box and drew out a small black vial, which he set lovingly on the trestle. Sister Claude was perched on a stool next to the bed.

"Father's preparing the oil," the infirmarian said. "Are you comfortable, can I
get you anything?"

"No." There was nothing for Claude to do now. Then: "Sister?"

"Yes, my lady."

"I'm so very—happy."

Claude stroked her hand. Eyes blurring, Heloise saw her gesture with her head to someone near the doorway. Moments later, there was the sound of oak smacking against oak, a single crash, then echoing silence, then another crash. The smacking noise receded as the sister with the death board shuffled slowly into the cloister to summon the nuns.

She thought, Twenty-one years since Abelard died. And still she woke each morning hungry for his face. Sister Claude got up and brought a standing candle and placed it behind Heloise's head. She looked at Claude and scratched her fingers at the coverlet. She breathed, "Bury me"—Sister Claude inclined her ear close to Heloise's lips—"with my lord." Claude, white-faced, nodded.

The nuns filed in so lightly that she was not aware of their entrance, only, later, of gold-flecked shapes massed above her head. Claude glided back, and the priest took her place; the prayers began. He tipped the vial, and she felt him trickle a drop of oil onto her eyelid. "Through this holy unction and his own most tender mercy, may the Lord pardon thee whatever offenses thou hast committed by sight." The hand moved away. She sensed it, rather than saw it.

The priest's voice dived lower, surfaced again, but she did not listen.

Unbidden, fragments kept weaving their way into her mind. She had seen the world rush on: all the events, great and small, that the chroniclers set down; all the people, good and evil, who had made them happen. She had stayed behind her cloister walls, removed supposedly from worldly matters; but she had watched. The war in Champagne had not touched the Paraclete, but a thousand souls in Vitry-sur-Marne had been burned alive in their church when Louis's soldiers set it afire. She remembered that, and of course the crusade that had failed. So when poor Louis got back to France afterward, there were some who wanted him to abdicate. But, in the end, people forgot. In her mind, she saw Abbot Suger, who had ruled France for Louis, the little fat man who had hated her and who was dead now. And Queen Eleanor, who had got Louis to divorce her and only a few weeks later married Henry Plantagenet, a lad young enough to be her son. And the boy Tom Becket, who had risen to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The same boy who had been Abelard's student long ago. How many years had that been? She did not want to count. There were no great masters at Paris now. Oh, there were plenty of teachers, men who called themselves philosophers, but none with the wit and brilliance of her Abelard.

She had not returned to the Ile since his death. Nor had she heard the sound of a lute for twenty years. She knew why.

At the Paraclete, after the crusade, they had become prosperous, and the hard years when they had plowed and built walls faded to curious memories. Papal bulls from a half dozen popes, royal charters, six daughter houses founded in twenty years. Their property holdings extended from the Marne to the Yonne. She had done her duty.

"Whatever offenses thou hast committed by touch—" Father William was repeating the unction; the oil dribbled over her hands. It would soon be finished. Absolved, shriven, unblemished as the moment she had come into the world. Where had the years gone, those billion lungfuls of breath inhaled and exhaled, squandered without her noticing? She thought, We begin to die from the moment we are born. This is but the end that was promised at the start.

She remembered the day that Ceci left, a bright September afternoon with the leaves rioting to saffron and Ceci tramping off into the oak woods to walk, or perhaps run—Heloise never knew exactly what she did there. That was something Ceci had never learned—to stay meekly within the cloister. And she remembered Sister Elizabeth streaking across the cloister with her skirts swirled up about her knees, and she, Heloise, coming out to see the hunters whose arrow had glanced from an oak. They had carried Ceci home under a rag blanket, her bloody corpse pierced like a wild boar. How many Septembers ago had that been? Five, and she remembered ramming her head against the door of the gatehouse, howling,
Ceci, don't leave me, what will 1 do without you!
and being amazed that she had felt that, let alone uttered it.

Ceci killed in a freakish accident. Jourdain, who had ridden off to the crusade with King Louis, killed by a Saracen arrow in the cucumber gardens outside Damascus. Astrolabe, whose lungs had fatally hemorrhaged the year after he became a canon at Nantes. Peter the Venerable gone too. Names drifting down the stream of time, beloved souls that touched hers and floated on, leaving her behind.

All at once, she thought of the letters, her black secrets hidden behind the wall of her chamber. Why had she not burned them, as she intended to do all along? She had never read them again, never even taken the box from its niche. Well, she thought. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now. They shall stay there until they crumble to dust; and she smiled.

Sister Claude's lips were moving, but Heloise could not hear the words above the roaring of her own breath. A column of mist closed upon her, and she felt herself being pulled, floating through a dark corridor. Somewhere behind her, she knew that women were weeping, but she didn't want to look back.

From a long way off drifted the sound of bells moaning, or perhaps it was only the wind. She came out of the blackness into a meadow, violently green. She had never known color to be so vivid.

Across the field, there was a stone wall, absurdly low. Not much use for keeping anyone out, she thought. Someone was sitting on the wall, and when he saw her, he grinned and stretched wide his arms. She rushed forward.

 

 

 

Note

 

 

While this is a
work of fiction, I have followed the outlines of Heloise and Abelard's lives and used nothing but historical facts, when those facts are known. At certain periods, their lives are extremely well documented by their own writings: Abelard's
Historia calamitatum
(Story of His Misfortunes) provides valuable details about his early life, his relationship with Heloise, and the castration.

In addition to Abelard's autobiography, I have used as my chief source the eight letters exchanged by Heloise and Abelard. Extracts from this correspondence are quoted verbatim in the text. Certain unlikely incidents in the novel, such as their lovemaking in the refectory of Sainte-Marie of Argenteuil, are described in the letters. Heloise's letters in particular are memorable for their frankness, and even today they retain the power to shock. It is difficult to reconcile the pious abbess with these erotic outpourings. But it is not Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete, who is speaking; it is Heloise the woman. Not for another eight centuries would a woman write so openly of sexual feeling.

The personal letters, along with Abelard's letters outlining a Rule for the nuns, were kept by Heloise at the Paraclete during her lifetime. Unfortunately, the circumstances in which they were first made public are not known. It has been suggested that sometime in the late thirteenth century, more than a hundred years after Heloise's death, they were brought to Paris and copied. At present, there are nine known manuscripts of the letters, but no trace of the originals.

Aside from the surviving writings of Heloise and Abelard, I have made liberal use of the letters exchanged between Heloise and Peter the Venerable; the letters of Bernard of Clairvaux; and various twelfth-century chronicles, charters, and documents. All of these I have combed for details and woven into the narrative. For example, it is a fact that Astrane was the first prioress of the Paraclete, that Peter the Venerable illegally removed Abelard's corpse, that Heloise brought a lawsuit against the abbot of Vauluisant over the disputed oak forest, and so forth.

In the few biographies of Heloise. she is presented as either a classic case of the helpless young woman, seduced and abandoned, or as a self-sacrificing cardboard saint. In this novel, I have tried to portray her as I believe she must have been: a highly intelligent woman who struggled with the demands imposed on her sex by twelfth-century society. In one sense, she was very much a woman of her own time, and certainly it is impossible to understand many of her actions without taking into account the twelfth-century mind. In other and perhaps more important ways, however, she was an alien in her own century, and in that sense she speaks directly to our own. In an era when learning was limited to a select few (and most of them men), Heloise shines forth as the most brilliant woman of medieval times. Her contemporaries, never quick to admire female intelligence, nevertheless praised her as surpassing in erudition all women and—the highest acclaim—nearly all men. But in the twelfth century, her gifts could only be counted as an embarrassing superfluity. There was nothing she could do with them, and it is interesting to speculate on the probable course of her life had she not met Peter Abelard. In all likelihood, her uncle, despite his encouragement of her studies, would have eventually married her to some wealthy baron.

The tragedy of Heloise and Abelard was well known during their lifetime. It is mentioned in the chronicles of William Godel of Limoges and the English courtier, Walter Map. In the thirteenth century's
Great Chronicle of Tours,
a fanciful entry about Heloise recounts: "It is said that when she was lying in her last illness she gave instructions that when she was dead she should be laid in the tomb of her husband. And when her dead body was carried to the open tomb, her husband, who had died long before her, raised his arms to receive her, and so clasped her closely in his embrace."

The romantic historian disregards the fact that Heloise was not placed in Abelard's tomb. In the necrology of the Paraclete, it is recorded that she was buried alongside Abelard in the crypt of the abbey church. For three hundred years they rested undisturbed. Then, in 1497, Abbess Catherine de Courcelles had the bodies exhumed and moved to either side of the altar in a new church, which had been built farther back from the river. Between that year and 1780, the remains were relocated several times within the church.

At the time of the French Revolution, the Paraclete was sold, the nuns dispersed, and its buildings, apart from the residence of the abbess, destroyed. A few days before the sale, several citizens of Nogent-sur-Seine took the bones of Heloise and Abelard to the church of Saint-Laurent in Nogent. In 1800, the artist Alexandre Lenoir requested permission of the state to bury them in Paris, at his Musee des Monuments Francais. Lenoir acquired a sarcophagus from the monastery of Saint-Marcel, which he believed to be the one in which Abelard was first buried. Fifteen years later, the museum was closed and the bones moved to the cemetery of Mont Louis, now called Pere-Lachaise. There they remain today.

Enclosing their sarcophagus is an elegant Gothic-style structure, its canopy adorned with gargoyles and spires. Around it has been added an iron fence to deter visitors from cutting their names in the stone. Through the railing, flowers are still sometimes left by Parisians, tourists, and lovers of all nationalities.