Steve Braunias on the immortal love affair between Heloise and Abelard.
Heloise and Abelard are still - 900 years after they flung themselves into one of the most famous romances in the history of the world - in the City of Light. "I came at length," Peter Abelard begins his 20,000-word autobiography Historia Calamitatum (the gorgeous Latin title is neatly translated as The Story of My Misfortunes, though it would be even neater as The Story of My Calamities), "to Paris." Much is inexact. They met in Paris in about 1115. There is no record of her surname (he was Peter Abelard) and no record of what they looked like. Every picture made of the lovers is fanciful, including an incredible sculpture representing the couple on the outside of a late-medieval building in France. It's carved in stone. It's not his face that catches the eye. It's what she's holding in one of her hands.
Heloise and Abelard are still deeply in love. History is one damned thing after another but the story of the affair between a couple in Paris during the Middle Ages will always feel alive, and tragic, and beautiful. Abelard, in Historia Calamitatum, makes one vague comment of what she looked like. Translations differ. In a 1922 edition by Henry Adams Bellows, Abelard writes she was "of no mean beauty". In a 1974 edition by Betty Radice, he writes, "Not a bad face." In Latin, he describes her as an "adolescentula", meaning little adolescent, or young girl; some scholars regard Heloise as 16. James Burge, author of a 2001 book of the affair, calculates she was 22. Abelard is variously 16 years older and 20 years older. Presentism walks in on the pair and disapproves of the power imbalance.
Heloise and Abelard are still having sex. Their love affair remains immortal thanks to the discovery, a century after their death, of eight letters exchanged between them – five by Abelard, three by Heloise. It's her letters that bewitch and captivate. They are erotic masterpieces. Cristina Nehring puts them this way in the New York Times: "The dust will not settle on such words. At once intrepid and idealistic, transgressive and submissive, taboo-busting and sweet-natured, noble and naughty, they have seduced scholars for centuries." James Burge puts it this way in his book: "What is clear is that both Abelard and Heloise liked sex."
Heloise and Abelard are still unhappy and brutalised and torn apart. Historia Calamitatum was written in the Middle Ages' practice of a "letter of consolation"; such letters were sent to friends who were unhappy, in an attempt to remind them that things could be a lot worse. It's assumed Abelard's letter was sent to a monk. The chances are that the monk would indeed have concluded that things could be a hell of a lot worse, because Historia Calamitatum is a long, sustained howl of despair, malice, grief, rage, and, in one unforgettable paragraph, physical trauma. The central drama of Heloise and Abelard is that her uncle found out about their affair, and sent thugs to Abelard's lodgings: "There they had vengeance upon me with a most cruel and shameful punishment, such as astounded the whole world, for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow." Heloise is holding his organs in her hand for all eternity, in stone on the outside of a building in Paris.
