Not His Empress but Your Whore

Paris, around 1115. Peter Abelard was the most famous man in Europe who did not wear a crown. Philosopher, logician, master of the cathedral school of Notre-Dame, he had made his reputation the way young geniuses do — by demolishing his own teachers in public disputation — and students followed him across France in the thousands. He was brilliant, celebrated, handsome, and knew all three. By his own account, written years later in his Historia Calamitatum — “The Story of My Calamities,” history’s most unsparingly titled autobiography — he had begun to believe himself the only philosopher standing in the world.

In Paris, there lived a young woman named Heloise, niece of a cathedral canon named Fulbert. She was perhaps in her late teens or early twenties, and she was famous too — famous, remarkably for a woman of that century, for learning. She read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; her letters would later move effortlessly among Cicero, Seneca, Lucan, and Scripture. Abelard wrote that in the abundance of her learning she was supreme in the realm. He decided, with the deliberateness he applied to everything, to seduce her — and he engineered it with a logician’s efficiency, persuading the unsuspecting Fulbert to take him in as a lodger and engage him as Heloise’s private tutor. Fulbert, Abelard noted with retrospective shame, had handed a tender lamb to a famished wolf.

What Abelard had not planned for was what happened next: the seduction succeeded, and so did something he had no category for. The tutorials dissolved into the affair. More words of love than of the lesson, he remembered; more kissing than teaching; our hands strayed oftener to the bosom than to the books. The most disciplined mind in Europe stopped writing philosophy and started writing love songs — songs that were sung all over Paris, so that (Heloise reminded him later, not without pride) her name was on every tongue in the city.

They were caught, as lovers are. Heloise bore a son — she named him Astrolabe, after the most sophisticated scientific instrument of the age, which tells you everything about the mother — and Abelard offered marriage. And here occurs one of the most astonishing moments in the history of love: Heloise argued against it. Marriage, she pointed out, would ruin Abelard’s career, since the church’s rising intellectual class was expected to be celibate; philosophy and domesticity could not share a house with wailing children and household muddle. But her deepest argument was about love itself, and it still burns off the page nine hundred years later: she did not want the bond of a contract. She wanted to be held by love alone, freely given. The name of wife, she wrote to him afterward, may seem holier, but sweeter to me will always be the word mistress — or, she added, if it does not shame you, concubine or whore. If the emperor Augustus offered her the whole world in marriage, she declared, it would seem dearer and more honorable to her to be called not his empress but Abelard’s harlot.

No one — no one — talked like that in the twelfth century. Heloise had arrived at a pure theory of disinterested love, love with every safety net cut away, and she meant it literally and lived by it to the end.

They married anyway, secretly, to appease Fulbert. It appeased nothing. When the secrecy (meant to protect Abelard’s position) made Fulbert suspect his niece had been dishonored rather than wed, and rumors and family fury spiraled, Abelard moved Heloise to the convent at Argenteuil where she had been schooled. Fulbert concluded that Abelard was discarding her. What followed, one night in Abelard’s lodgings, was the vengeance for which the story is infamous: hired men broke in and castrated him.

In the catastrophe’s aftermath, Abelard took monastic vows at Saint-Denis — out of shame, he admitted, not vocation. And he required Heloise, first, to take the veil at Argenteuil. She was in her early twenties. Witnesses recorded that as she walked to the altar she recited, weeping, not a prayer but Cornelia’s speech from Lucan’s Pharsalia — the lament of a wife who blames herself for a great man’s ruin. She became a nun with a pagan poem on her lips, in obedience not to God but to Abelard. She never pretended otherwise.

For more than a decade they had no contact. Abelard’s calamities continued — his theology condemned, his books burned, his monastic career a series of feuds — while Heloise rose to become prioress, and then, when Abelard gave her and her displaced nuns his own oratory of the Paraclete, she became its abbess, and one of the most respected religious women in France. Then, around 1132, a copy of the Historia Calamitatum fell into her hands, and Heloise did what she had been waiting half her life to do. She wrote to him.

The letters that followed are the summit of medieval literature and among the greatest documents of the human heart in any age. Heloise’s first letter is a controlled detonation: to her lord, or rather father; husband, or rather brother; from his handmaid, or rather daughter; wife, or rather sister — the salutation alone maps the whole impossible relationship. She reminds him that she is owed more than silence: You know, everyone knows, what I have lost in you. She tells him — an abbess, writing this — that the pleasures of their love were so sweet that she cannot repent them, that in the very celebration of the Mass their images return to her, and that God knows, in every circumstance of her life, it is Abelard she has feared to offend more than God. She asks him for what she asked for at the beginning: not support, not doctrine — words. You are the only one who can make me sad, or joyful, or comforted. While I am denied your presence, give me at least the sweetness of your image in your words.

Abelard’s replies are cooler — pastoral, deflecting her passion toward Christ — and readers have argued for centuries about whether that coolness was conviction, self-protection, or a broken man’s only remaining shelter. But he did not abandon her. The correspondence turned, at her insistence, to the practical: he wrote a rule for her convent, hymns for her nuns to sing, answers to her scholarly questions — a life’s collaboration conducted in the only register left to them. When Abelard died in 1142, hounded to the end by heresy proceedings, the abbot of Cluny — Peter the Venerable, one of the era’s rare wholly decent men — wrote to Heloise a letter of such tenderness that it deserves its own fame and had Abelard’s body brought secretly to her at the Paraclete. She outlived him by more than twenty years, ruling her abbey with distinction, and was buried beside him.

Their bones were moved more than once, and tradition — improvable, irresistible — says that when the tomb was opened, Abelard’s skeleton raised its arms to receive her. Today they lie, or are said to lie, under a Gothic canopy in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where lovers still leave letters. Of course they do. Heloise holds the copyright, in Western civilization, on love freely given against all interest and all advice. Every love letter that says I want nothing from you but you is quoting her.

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God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself. I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage bond, no marriage portion... And if the name of wife seems holier and more binding, sweeter to me will always be the word mistress — or, if you will permit me, concubine or whore... If Augustus, master of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess forever, it would seem to me dearer and more honorable to be called not his empress but your whore.

— Heloise to Abelard, first letter (c. 1132), translated from the Latin for this volume. Original in the public domain.

You are the only one who can make me sad, who can make me joyful, who can bring me comfort... While I am denied your presence, give me at least, through your words — of which you have an abundance — some sweet semblance of yourself.

— From the same letter, translated from the Latin for this volume.

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