Abelard and Heloise the Witch

Often described as one of the world’s great love stories, the relationship between Abélard and Héloïse is often celebrated alongside such fabled affairs as Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas or Cleopatra and Mark Anthony. However, the Bretons of yesteryear carried a very different remembrance; that of Héloïse as evil witch but does either standing hang true?

A little of the background to this reputation might be helpful for those unfamiliar with the story of one of the greatest logicians of the Middle Ages and his love affair with a strong-willed and, unusually for the time, well-educated young lady.

Around the turn of the 12^th century, Peter Abélard, left his comfortable home in Brittany to study rhetoric and dialectic from the leading teachers of the day. After a spell at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame de Paris, this able young man felt confident enough to establish himself as a teacher, first at Melun and then in Corbeil, near Paris. Abélard seems to have excelled in the art of the debate and soon earned a reputation as a brilliant scholar, having publicly bested his former teachers. Although undoubtedly clever, he does not seem to have been particularly wise, alienating many of his peers with his pride and arrogance while causing controversies that could have been avoided.

.

Sometime around 1115, Abélard returned to the cathedral school of Notre-Dame de Paris as master and soon became aware of Héloïse; a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, well versed in the Classics, who lived within the cathedral precincts under the care of her uncle, a canon of the cathedral chapter of Saint-Étienne. Captivated by her intellect, Abélard resolved to seduce her and used his reputation to convince her uncle that he was the right man to continue the girl’s education but could only devote the necessary time to this endeavour if he lived in their household.

A romantic relationship duly evolved between the celebrated master of argument and his teenage pupil that seems to have become known to Héloïse’s uncle in early 1116. Abélard was cast out of the canon’s home but the couple continued their illicit relationship and Héloïse fell pregnant. With scandal looming, Abélard spirited his lover out of Paris and took her to his family home in Brittany, almost 400km away, and it was here, towards the end of that year, that Héloïse gave birth to their son. Leaving mother and baby under the care of his sister, Abélard returned to Paris to placate his lover’s furious uncle.

.

A wedding was eventually agreed upon; a course of action that neither seemed to really want. Abélard demanded a secret ceremony so as not to endanger any future positions he might aspire to within the Church hierarchy. Héloïse seems to have been against the idea for fear that she was unworthy of Abélard and that marriage would distract him from his destiny; later, she would argue that marriage constituted a form of prostitution. Having left her baby son in Brittany, Héloïse returned to Paris and a very discreet wedding with Abélard.

To maintain the pretence that both parties were still single, Héloïse returned to live in the home of her uncle. However, it seems that he cared more for family honour than discretion and silenced the gossips by declaring that his niece was lawfully married to Abélard; a state of affairs that she publicly denied in order to protect her new husband’s standing. Her relationship with her uncle now destroyed by scandal, Abélard once again spirited her out of Paris and placed her in a convent at Argenteuil.

.

Héloïse’s uncle was enraged and likely believed that his niece had been placed in the convent so as not to be an inconvenient embarrassment for her new husband. It was possibly this sense of injustice that led to him arranging for a group of men to bribe their way into Abélard’s home one night and castrate him. Such a barbarous attack on one of the city’s foremost citizens could not be quietly dismissed; Abélard’s valet and one of the perpetrators were punished with castration and blinded but no other assailants could be traced. Despite having denied any involvement in the affair, Héloïse’s uncle was removed from his position at the cathedral and had his assets seized.

The following year, solely out of obedience to Abélard’s bidding, Héloïse took Holy Orders; a commitment Abélard himself made shortly after. Once again, his teaching was in great demand and he continued to pointedly court controversy in some of his theological debates. However, in making a personal attack against one of his former masters, Roscelin de Compiègne, he fired the first salvo in a very public war of words. He was accused of supporting his wife with the fees that he had raised from his pupils; a breach of trust amplified by Roscelin, who rebuked him over his former pupil, saying: “Not sparing the virgin entrusted to you, whom you should have taught as a student … you taught her not to argue but to fornicate.”

.

When the convent in Argenteuil closed in 1129, Abélard subsequently arranged for Héloïse and her sisters to be rehoused at an oratory he had founded in Nogent-sur-Seine some eight years earlier but which had since been abandoned. Here, Héloïse, who became the newly rededicated priory’s Abbess, wrote Problemata Heloissae, a collection of forty-two questions, which she and her sisters raised and Abélard answered. However, it is the exchange of eight letters, written before Problemata, that form the basis of their status as one of the world’s great love stories.

Abélard’s Historia Calamitatum (History of my Misfortunes), ostensibly an autobiographical letter to “a friend”, formed the first part of this, now famous, correspondence. Perhaps something has been lost in the intervening years because I found little in this epistle to merit its august reputation. The letter might have been designed to shock Héloïse into accepting that their love affair was over but Abélard seems so self-absorbed that this seems unlikely. He confesses of his earliest intent to seduce Héloïse and his confidence that his famed eloquence would win her over: “Héloïse, I was convinced, would lend little resistance as she had a good education and wanted to broaden it further”. Abélard also talks of having to coerce her consent by threats and blows and even that: “I sometimes went so far as to hit her, blows given out of love.”

.

The letter is almost totally bereft of love, instead it reads as the eulogy of a man who wishes to be remembered by posterity after the fashion of his own making; a victim who loved logic and reason above all else and suffered because of this. A suffering imposed on him by God on account of his youthful pride and exacerbated by the persecution of his contemporaries; all driven by their envy of his talents. His romantic affair with Héloïse is almost dismissed as a reckless abandonment of the intellectual quest to which he was devoted; a short-lived lustful diversion from his vocation, an abhorrent interruption to his philosophy.

The letters written by Héloïse seem to talk of a completely different relationship. Perhaps in a sideswipe to him addressing his letter to a friend, she struggles to find an appropriate word to describe their relationship; “her lord, or rather her father, her husband, or rather her brother”, before deciding that: “sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if you be not ashamed, whore”. She expresses her bewilderment at having been so completely abandoned by Abélard, she talks a great deal of her mad love for him and the personal sacrifice she made by acceding to his demands that she become a nun and embrace a celibate life.

.

She seems to have borne him little animosity, reminding him of her “love without measure” and lauding him as her master. Speaking of their earliest days, she tells him: “Who among kings or philosophers could equal you in fame? … What wife, what maiden did not yearn for you?” and “You possessed two talents, among all, capable of immediately seducing the heart of a woman: that of writing verse and of singing”. She seems to continually define herself by her associations with Abélard, regretting that her devotion to him led to their current state and that it was perhaps the “lot of women to bring total ruin on great men”.

In her last letters, Héloïse appears to accept Abélard’s rejection of her but not his constant calls for her to repent past sins and find the love of God, she even appears to tease him by confessing: “The amorous pleasures we tasted together are so sweet to me that I am unable to hate them or even drive them from my memory.  … Even during the solemnities of the Mass, when prayer should be purer still, obscene images assail my soul and occupy it more than the office.” Perhaps it was declarations like this that prompted Abélard to observe in a letter to his son: “There are some who revel in the sins they have committed, so much so that they never really repent. So sweet is the lure of this pleasure, let them suffer no penance. This is what our Héloïse has become used to, to constantly complain, to me, to herself”.

.

Although Abélard’s reputation was established across the border in France, his attachment to Brittany ran deep and remained so throughout his life. He was born, around 1078, into minor nobility in the small Breton village of Le Pallet, just a few miles away from the thriving city of Nantes. The family estate would be his sanctuary during some of the most turbulent periods of his life, such as when, around 1105, he returned for a few years to recover his constitution after the stresses of his work had become too much to bear. It was to this place that he took Héloïse to have their baby; a boy they named Astralabe who would stay in Le Pallet until taking Holy Orders in 1145.

Unfortunately, Abélard’s six years spent as Abbot of the Abbey of Saint-Gildas de Rhuys in southern Brittany were not, for him, a happy time: “It was a barbarous land, an unknown language, a brutal and savage population and monks whose behaviour was notoriously rebellious to all checks. … The whole horde of the country was equally lawless, there was no one whose help I could claim. Outside, the lord and his henchmen did not cease to overwhelm me; inside, the brothers perpetually laid traps for me”.

.

Somehow, the letters of Abélard and Héloïse survived the ages but it was not until 1616 that some were first published in Latin and it would be another hundred years before their collected letters were translated and printed in 1718. Slowly but steadily, the mythologising began; here were the prototype doomed lovers, the medieval lives that had breathed the passion of Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere. The Romantic movement of the 18^th and 19^th centuries recast Abélard as a rebellious free thinker, a dangerous bohemian battered by an unmoving Church; a Renaissance man born out of time with Héloïse a model of female emancipation and unjustly overlooked philosopher.

One of the chief recorders of traditional Breton ballads in the 19^th century, Théodore de la Villemarqué, collected some twenty variants of a song about Héloïse, or sometimes a nameless witch, that casts the good Abbess in a most sinister light. To me, the best rendition of this old song into English was produced by the Scottish author Lewis Spence in 1917; he gives it a dramatic, poetic flourish that I would not have had the nerve or skill to do. This then is the Ballad of Héloïse and Abélard or Loiza hag Abalard in Breton.

Oh Abélard, my Abélard,
Twelve summers have passed since first we kissed.
There is no love like that of a bard:
Who loves him lives in a golden mist!

No word of French nor Roman tongue,
But only Breton could I speak,
When round my lover’s neck I hung
And heard the harmony of the Greek.

.

The Mass I chant like any priest,
Can shrive the dying or bury the dead,
But dearer to me to raise the Beast
Or watch the gold in the furnace red.

The wolf, the serpent, the crow, the owl,
The demons of sea, of field, of flood,
I can run or fly in their forms so foul,
They come at my call from wave or wood.

I know a song that can raise the sea,
Can rouse the winds or shudder the earth,
Can darken the heavens terribly,
Can wake portents at a prince’s birth.

The first dark drug that ever we sipped
Was brewed from toad and the eye of crow,
Slain in a mead when the moon had slipped
From heaven to the fetid fogs below.

.

I know a well as deep as death,
A gloom where I cull the frondent fern,
Whose seed with that of the golden heath
I mingle when mystic lore I’d learn.

I gathered in dusk nine measures of rye,
Nine measures again, and brewed the twain
In a silver pot, while fitfully
The starlight struggled through the rain.

I sought the serpent’s egg of power
In a dell hid low from the night and day:
It was shown to me in an awful hour
When the children of hell came out to play.

I have three spirits – seeming snakes;
The youngest is six score years young,
The second rose from the nether lakes,
And the third was once Duke Satan’s tongue.

.

The wild bird’s flesh is not their food,
No common umbles are their dole;
I nourish them well with infants’ blood,
Those precious vipers of my soul.

Oh Satan! grant me three years still,
But three short years, my love and I,
To work thy fierce, mysterious will,
Then gladly shall we yield and die.

Héloïse, wicked heart, beware!
Think on the dreadful day of wrath,
Think on thy soul; forbear, forbear!
The way thou takest is that of death!

Thou craven priest, go, get thee hence!
No fear have I of fate so fell.
Go, suck the milk of innocence,
Leave me to quaff the wine of hell!

.

While Spence’s version is full of dark drama and poetry, there are a few notable phrases from the original that were necessarily omitted for the sake of form and verse. In the original, Héloïse states that: “I was only twelve years of age when I fled my father’s house to follow my dear clerk and be Abélard’s spouse”; a subtle but important difference that better sets the scene for the depravity that follows. The original song also tells us that it was the left eye of the crow that was imbibed with magical power for her witch’s brew, while another variant tells that the fern seeds were collected on the night of Midsummer. In the version above, Héloïse gathers eighteen measures of rye for her brew but the original talks of wreaking sabotage and famine: “From the eighteen armfuls of rye that the Abbot’s monks had sown, they harvested only two handfuls of corn”.

We learn in the original that her three snakes are adders that are hidden in a silver casket where they brood a serpent’s egg that, if hatched, “the damage caused will be dire; for seven miles around, it will spit flames and fire”. These brooding snakes she feeds with the blood of innocents, the first she killed in a churchyard. The baby boy was buried by a crossroads but she took off her shoes and dug him up. The ending to Spence’s version is wonderfully defiant and you can almost hear Héloïse, the great sorceress, screaming into the wind. The original carries an ending that would likely have felt just as powerful to the audiences of old: “Take great care, Héloïse, of your soul, for if this world is yours, the other belongs to God!”

Advertisement