Stealing Heaven

Marion Meade

 

 

For Alison

 

 

 

 

FOREWORD

 

 

I love the idea of chivalrous knights as much as the next romantic. There is no greater excitement than reading tales of lords and ladies, Gothic cathedrals and moated castles and poetic troubadours. Ah, to be a pilgrim on the road to Compostela. But I also know something not so pleasant about medieval society It was a lousy time in which to be a woman. Regarded as intellectually inferior to men, females were viewed as good for little except breeding.

The subject of my first major biography was the incomparable Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of first France and then England, probably the only woman in history to grace the throne of two such mighty kingdoms. In my quest for another heroine, I found myself again reaching back to the 12th century in the hope of finding a woman to rival Queen Eleanor. My next biography, I decided, would be about a legendary couple whose love story has been called one of the greatest in history. Heloise was a gifted student of the classics who fell recklessly in love with her tutor, the renowned philosopher Peter Abelard. Their affair—an adolescent and a man more than twice her age— ended in a terrible act of revenge by her family. Following the vicious crime, the two lovers separated, Heloise to became a nun and Abelard a monk.
 

I spent three months in the fall of 1977 at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, reading everything that might shed light on Heloise and Abelard. By Christmas, after countless lunches at Chock Full o'Nuts—coffee and their famous nut and cream cheese sandwiches—I was forced to admit defeat. A biography might be feasible, but not one done right. Even using all the library's collections—some 900 years worth—there was not really adequate material to reconstruct their lives. Yet I hated to give up the subject altogether. Back in my apartment on the Upper West Side, I continued to look for a solution.
 

As a biographer knows from experience, the time to slit your throat is when the subject suddenly disappears from center stage. No longer does the biographer (or the reader) know what's going on. The narrative starts to bog down. What generally happens is a desperate attempt to keep things moving along with scraps, minor characters, and artful speculation. Some biographers discover an unsuspected talent for fiction. The best you can hope for is that nobody will notice.

Finally, however, I had to acknowledge that a biography was never going to work. But what if I wrote the story as fiction instead, a novel told from Heloise's point of view. What if I followed the outlines of her and Abelard's life, using historical facts whenever they were known. Imagination would fill in the empty spaces.
 

The problem was that the subject matter did not quite lend itself to commercial fiction. Readers of historical dramas expect happy-ever-after endings. In a fictional saga like, say,
Gone With the Wind
, Scarlett is probably losing Rhett but assures herself that tomorrow is another day. In a novel based on a true story such as this one, optimism played no part in the plot. Moreover, the raw sexuality displayed by the couple was extraordinary. Even worse, Abelard's castration could easily turn stomachs. On the other hand, a story infused by unspeakable violence certainly did make it powerful. All in all, the chance to retell such an unusual tragedy seemed to outweigh the difficulties.
 

Another concern of mine was how to invoke the rich physical details of daily life. In the 1100s, sanitation tended to be primitive, for example, and city dwellers were in the habit of emptying their chamber pots into the street. Nothing we could imagine happening in modern times. But in the 1970s, West 100th St. between West End and Amsterdam were very bad blocks with a bunch of single room occupancy hotels, in short, our neighborhood flophouses. Because rowdy residents were known to flip cigarette butts out their windows, followed by all sorts of household trash, we knew to tread carefully. Perhaps time travel back to medieval Paris would be unnecessary, after all.
 

One question I am often asked is how many of the characters are based on real people. Very few: the son of Heloise and Abelard, her uncle, a handful of church leaders like Peter the Venerable. As for my characterization of Heloise, it reflects the actual woman, not the seduced and abandoned teenager of the legends. Heloise was not merely intelligent, she had the best female mind in all of the middle ages, it was said. As abbess of the Paraclete, she became a medieval entrepreneur, who successfully operated a “corporate” organization. Someone with her ability would be managing a major company today.
 

Another query is about my sources. Luckily I had several primary documents: the intensely personal letters exchanged by the couple told me a lot about the facts of Heloise's situation, particularly her inner life. And the same is only slightly less true for Abelard, whose autobiography
Historia calamitatum
eloquently recounts how he came to be brought low. Otherwise, I drew on the numerous sources used for
Eleanor of Aquitaine
: all the standard chronicles, documents, and ecclesiastical histories.
 

It should be remembered that the story of Abelard and Heloise was well known in their lifetimes— they were already famous in their own rights prior to the affair—and therefore a number of historians took note of them. In Western literature, great poets and dramatists also found them fascinating. It is said that Shakespeare, in 1606, began working on
Abelard and Elois, a Tragedie
, a project he was to abandon for
Antony and Cleopatra
.
 

Stealing Heaven
has seldom been out of print since its publication in 1979. Afterward I decided that my failure to produce a biography was a blessing in disguise. Embellishing the narrative with footnotes seemed pointless; it was better suited to cinema. Successfully adapted for the screen, the novel was filmed on location in Yugoslavia where it was possible to replicate medieval settings. The
New York Times
called the performances powerful, noting that the “exceptional lives” of the lovers brought to mind
The Lion in Winter
crossed with
Camelot
.
 

 

Marion Meade

October 2010

New York City

 

 

 

 

May 16, 1163

 

 

"Open the shutters,
will you?"

The bowed head next to her bed snapped erect and she heard the sound of rosary beads clattering to the floor. "My lady—?"

"The shutters. Open them, please." Through the small, high window, she could see a sliver of moon glinting hard and clear; the sky was drenched silver with stars. Staring, she felt the crystalline drops draw close enough to touch, their phosphorescence blinding her. She blinked feebly, and when she looked again they had retreated, playful and aloof, beyond her grasp once more.

How long had she lain there? Weeks? Perhaps only days. She did not know, nor did she care enough to ask. Earlier this evening, after vespers, the nun who sat by her bed had suddenly gasped and run to fetch the board and stick. She had heard her race into the cloister, furiously beating the death board, and soon the infirmary had begun to fill with women, ready to start the litany. But Sister Claude had come and bustled them away, briskly sending them back to their suppers and muttering in gentle reproof to the precipitate sister still clutching the splintered board. Heloise had laughed to herself. She was not ready; she would not be hurried. For so long she had hungered to embrace this moment, prayed for it, ached with anticipation, and now that the time had arrived, she felt, perversely, no need to hurry. Only our beginnings and endings are truly worthy of the name mystery; one cannot be conscious of birth, but death, if one desires, may be lived. She wished to savor her end, or at least experience it. She would not permit them to hurry her into darkness.

A balmy night breeze from the river streamed through the window and eddied along the plain stone walls. In the corner, a blue flame trembled convulsively beneath a crucifix. Eyes half closed, she listened to the rustling murmur of the water nearby, its sonorous ripples racing in time with her breathing. A choir of frogs chanted ecstatic plainsong from among the tangled reeds.

"My lady abbess," a voice murmured, "a sip of gruel." Arms lifted her head. Obedient, she strained to open her mouth, but the greasy liquid flowed down her chin, and finally they rested her head against the pillow again.

Her body felt strangely weightless, as insubstantial as the configuration of smoke; she could feel neither her legs nor the stabbing pain in her belly that had tormented her these many months. I shall not be unhappy to abandon this body, she thought; it has mocked and destroyed me.

She sighed and closed her eyes. Behind her lids immediately danced a ghostly face: a pair of great, lustrous eyes the color of heliotrope framed in a cloud of pale hair, roseate mouth sensually crooning, "Bunny, sweet bunny." It was that elusive, unknown face she had sought so determinedly for sixty years, always rearranging the features into different patterns, always uncertain that she had fitted them together correctly. Ah, she thought, so that is what you looked like; I remember now. The woman faded, and in her place marched a slow procession of familiar figures, long dead, each moving into the center of her vision for a few moments, then sweeping aside to make way for the next. A lean woman in black, in her hand a switch raised menacingly. A grimy child, merry-eyed and hilarious, holding aloft a half-eaten honey bun in sticky fingers. A marble-faced man, thin lips drawn tautly together, who embraced her fiercely and then thrust her away in disgust. A sleeping newborn infant, fretted blue veins etched on the vellum lids, his smile trailing clouds from other realms. And lastly a prancing skull-faced man, his lipless mouth stretching into a terrible grin, feet executing an obscene dance on skeleton toes. In his outstretched hands he held a knife dripping red streamers and a wrinkled mound of bloody flesh. First gracious, then insistent, he pressed on her his monstrous gifts. A scream ripped through her throat. "Aristotle!"

"My lady-"

Weak, she opened her eyes. In the milky light, cowled shadows bent over her, comforting, stroking, pressing a cool towel against her forehead. Their voices tumbled softly above her. "She speaks of Aristotle now!" "Shhh" "Jesu, mercy—Jesu, have mercy on her soul—"

"Where is Aristotle? Call the naughty girl. Ceci, look under the bed."

The nuns exchanged glances. They were silent a moment, and then one of them said, "Sister Cecilia is not here, lady."

Shutting out the hum of the voices, she moved her eyes to the flame and then slowly upward to the crucifix with the man's slack body glued to the cross. The flame stirred and heaved, its glow throwing up arms of vivid citron and azure and amber around the crucifix. The stone walls were bathed in mute lilac shadows. She looked away from the corner and saw clearly the walls of the room, stark, gray, ugly, and listened to the distant rustle of the nuns' skirts. The earliest things she could remember were stony walls and black-robed women murmuring in whispers. The peace of the sepulcher, she mused. For only a few short years had she been reprieved, thrust innocent and naked out of that immuring grayness into the blazing white light of the world.

Once she had tasted freedom, or the illusion of it, but then his invisible hand had reached out and pulled the fugitive back.
Oh God! thou who made this world and all that is in it, why did thou condemn me to gray walls and an existence I always loathed? What lessons did thou mean to teach me and why did 1, who greedily absorbed all human wisdom, learn so late to discern thine?

Somehow she had lived through sixty-three summers, playing her tedious roles, forever smiling and dissembling, never allowing the world to glimpse the real woman. Quickly, she corrected herself. To him she had revealed her true self. Sometimes. But even he could not accept her. The letters, those shameless shreds dredged from the bottom of her soul, those offerings of truth delivered up to his aghast silence; her hands clutched the coverlet in stinging memory. Ah, my very sweet friend, she thought, you didn't understand my love. In the end, you learned to love God, even, in your own way, to love me. But it had taken so long.