How the French Invented Love (2 page)

Nevertheless, soon after the birth of their son, named Astrolabe, Abélard and Héloïse were secretly wed in church in the presence of her uncle and a few witnesses. They wanted the marriage to remain secret so that Abélard’s reputation would not be ruined. But this covert situation did not satisfy Héloïse’s uncle, with whom she was still living. When he began to abuse her with vicious words and unrestrained blows, Abélard decided to place her temporarily in Argenteuil Abbey, the same convent where she had been educated as a girl. Believing that Abélard had sent Héloïse to the abbey to be rid of her, her uncle had him punished by a monstrous act: at night while Abélard was sleeping, servants stole into his room and castrated him. Castrated! Even our worst-taste horror movies are reluctant to portray such a gory crime.

I
probably first heard the names of Abélard and Héloïse in the Cole Porter song “It Was Just One of Those Things” from the 1935 musical
Jubilee
: “As Abélard said to Héloïse, / Don’t forget to drop me a line, please.”

That song was popular throughout the mid-twentieth century when sophisticated theatergoers were expected to recognize such references. But the names meant nothing to me until I studied medieval French literature at Wellesley College in the 1950s and read the well-known “Ballade of the Ladies of Bygone Times” written by the fifteenth-century poet François Villon:

    
Where is the learned Héloïse

    
For whom Abélard was gelded

    
And made a monk at Saint Denis?

    
For her true love he bore those trials.
²

I looked up the word
châtré
, translated here as “gelded,” though “castrated” is closer to the original, and then I got up the nerve to ask my professor for further explanation. Professor Andrée Bruel, a hulking female who had no problem demonstrating the gestures used by knights in battle, awkwardly explained that Pierre Abélard had indeed lost his testicles at the hands of thugs engaged by Héloïse’s uncle. Then she cut the matter short and referred me to the letters exchanged by the two lovers and to Abélard’s autobiography.

I somehow managed to read these texts (in a French translation from the Latin) between my regular class assignments and was dumbfounded. How could this teenager—younger than I was—have surrendered so completely to a man more than twice her age, and a cleric to boot! How could they have defied the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church with its known contempt for human passion and its belief that making love, unless performed by a married couple for the purpose of procreation, was sinful fornication? How could they have endured societal and family pressures that penalized unwed mothers and married clerics? How did they survive the pain and ignominy of Abélard’s emasculation?

I now know that Abélard’s gruesome mutilation would not have prevented him from living with Héloïse as her husband. Having been married within the church, they were legal spouses in every sense of the word, and the church granted annulment only when a marriage had not been consummated. Yet this domestic scenario was not to be. Abélard instructed Héloïse to enter the convent permanently and to take religious vows, which he would also take as a monk. Why did he make this decision and why did she follow his command?

Long after their separation, Abélard tried to justify his actions in his
Historia calamitatum
, written in the form of a consolation letter to a friend. He explained:

    I admit that it was shame and confusion in my remorse and misery rather than any devout wish for conversion which brought me to seek shelter in a monastery cloister. Héloïse had already agreed to take the veil in obedience to my wishes and entered a convent. So we both put on the religious habit, I in the Abbey of St Denis and she in the Convent of Argenteuil.

His letter to a supposed friend was circulated among those who could read Latin and eventually came to the attention of Héloïse. By that time, she was past thirty and had been living apart from Abélard for about fifteen years, first at Argenteuil where she had become its prioress, and later as the abbess of the Oratory of the Paraclete, founded by none other than her erstwhile husband Abélard. Still, her passion had lost none of its ferocity, and she reproached him for having made no effort to contact or comfort her, as he had done for his anonymous friend.

“Tell me one thing, if you can,” she cried out. “Why after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you? . . . I will tell you what I think and indeed the world suspects. It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love.”

Héloïse zeroes in on a distinction that will be made over and over again as we consider variations on the theme of love. Are men motivated mainly by physical desire and women more by their emotions? Or put more grossly, are men led by their penises and women by their hearts? A combination of physical desire and emotional attachment is what Héloïse felt for Abélard, whereas she thought he had experienced only lust. This sounds like a difference between females and males that is still much debated today. (I’m thinking in particular of the books by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
and
The Male Brain
, which point out that a man has two and a half times as much brain space devoted to sexual pursuit as a woman, while the female brain’s empathy system is considerably more active than the male’s.
³
) Certainly, Héloïse had held onto her “love beyond all bounds” for Abélard long after he had withdrawn from her.

Fifteen years earlier, she had taken the veil for his sake, without any inclination of her own, and her absolute allegiance to him rather than to God had not changed over time. Even as the abbess of the Paraclete, she still cast him in the role of “master,” “father,” and “husband,” with complete power over her fate. Being a woman in those days meant being subservient to men. This was true in both personal and religious life, though some female religious orders managed to establish considerable autonomy for themselves and some forceful women were able to reign over their husbands. The one place no one could control, not even Héloïse herself, was her unconscious.

In her letters to Abélard, she confessed to erotic desires that had not disappeared with the years, whereas he had accepted his castration as a form of divine punishment. Fifty-four at the time of the letters and lacking the body parts that contribute to virility, Abélard looked back on their love affair and marriage as past history, which had been entirely replaced by the love of God. He counseled Héloïse to try to follow his example. But Héloïse was then only thirty-two and still pined for lost pleasures. While she fulfilled her role as abbess with outward distinction, she remained in her imagination Abélard’s wife and lover, consumed by lubricious memories:

    Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost. Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you.

Héloïse’s impassioned cry has echoed through the ages. She speaks for all women who have loved without reserve and then found themselves deprived of the one they loved. Death, divorce, abandonment, physical impairment have reduced countless women, and men, to lives of unquiet desperation. Separated so abruptly and so grotesquely, Héloïse and Abélard lived out their remaining years as members of the religious orders that had taken them in, even if Abélard was constantly at war with fellow theologians and Héloïse was ceaselessly tormented by longings of the flesh. Already, during their lifetime, they were regarded with awe by their contemporaries, and in later centuries they acquired a devoted following who treated them like patron saints. Undoubtedly, Abélard’s castration contributed to their sacred aura, since bodily mutilation of some sort—think of Saint Sebastian’s arrow-pierced chest or Saint Agatha’s amputated breasts—is often associated with sainthood. It was not difficult to consider the famous pair, Abélard with his debilitating wound and Héloïse with her mental anguish, as martyrs to love.

Following Abélard’s request, he was buried at the Paraclete in 1144, to be joined by Héloïse two decades later, on May 16, 1164. Later, at the time of the French Revolution, when the convent was sold and the buildings demolished, their bones were taken to the nearby Church of Saint-Laurent in Nogent-sur-Seine. In 1817, their remains were transferred to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where they now lie under a soaring Gothic-style tomb. In time, lovers began to make pilgrimages to their grave. The last time I visited it, I saw a bouquet of daffodils and a small card asking the long-dead couple for their blessings.

CHAPTER ONE

Courtly Love

How the French Invented Romance

I
N MY OPINION, A PERSON IS NOT WORTH ANYTHING

IF HE OR SHE DOES NOT DESIRE LOVE.

Bernart de Ventadorn, activity circa 1147–1170

A lover gives his heart to his lady. Weaving, Arras, 1400–1401. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Copyright Kathleen Cohen.

M
y French friend Marianne married Pierre in 1977, soon after a divorce that gave her sole custody of her twin daughters. She was twenty-nine at the time, and Pierre was forty-nine. Pierre’s sister, Jeanne, warned him that with such an age difference, he was likely to become a cuckold. Pierre responded that if that time were to come, he would survey the field of available men and choose a lover for his wife. Marianne did not wait for Pierre to find her a lover. Some fifteen years into their marriage, she fell in love with Stéphane, a Frenchman of her own age. Stéphane and Marianne did their best to keep their affair secret, but she was seen once too often exiting his apartment, and word got back to Pierre, who was at first incredulous and then enraged. He confronted his wife, asking her to choose between him and her lover. Deeply attached to Pierre, who had helped raise her daughters, but madly in love with Stéphane, she was torn between the two men and could not leave one or the other. Eventually she turned to Pierre’s sister, Jeanne, begging her to negotiate an arrangement.

She would stay in the marriage until death, if she were allowed to be out of the house with no questions asked, from four to seven o’clock, every day except Sunday. After many hours of painfully frank talk, Pierre swallowed his pride and accepted her terms. They stayed married for another twelve years, until Pierre became terminally ill, whereupon Marianne nursed him faithfully until he died. She grieved him sincerely and then moved in with Stéphane.

It is, I believe, a quintessentially French story. Since I knew all the parties concerned, I can say that they carried it off with great dignity. Marianne never spoke to me, or to anyone else, about the arrangement: I heard it from Jeanne. Although most of the people in their circle knew that Marianne and Stéphane were lovers, no one ever mentioned it. Everyone kept up appearances following the etiquette of their upper-bourgeois social class.

How is it that Marianne, Pierre, and Stéphane were able to live out this unconventional scenario? Where in French history do we find the origins of such behavior? My mind immediately jumps back to the Middle Ages, to the fervent love stories of Lancelot and Guinevere, and Tristan and Iseult, and other tales of women halved between their husbands and their lovers. If this topos is by now a stock theme, incarnated in such world-famous novels as
Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina
, we should not forget that adultery as a literary subject first became fashionable in twelfth-century France. Yes, we are talking about the same century that encompassed the real-life history of Abélard and Héloïse.

In real life, medieval women were subject to male authority, be it the rule of the father, the husband, or the priest. Remember how Héloïse submitted to absolute decisions made by her uncle and her teacher-lover-husband. Under Abélard’s tutelage, she was initiated into sex and love. At his insistence, she went to Brittany to have her baby and gave him up to the care of Abélard’s family. She married Abélard in secret despite her reservations about marriage, and she complied with his order to hide out in the convent where she had been raised. She even took the veil at his behest, though she had no sense of a religious vocation. Even such a remarkable woman as Héloïse bowed to the dictates of men. This was undoubtedly the case for almost all medieval women, be they peasants or princesses.