Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/22

10 Fulbert had justly avenged treachery with treachery. But what a figure I should cut in public! how the world would point its finger at me! I was also confounded at the thought of the Levitical law, according to which I had become an abomination to the Church. In this misery the confusion of shame—I confess it—rather than the ardour of conversion drove me to the cover of the cloister, after she had willingly obeyed my command to take the veil. I became a monk in the abbey of St. Denis, and she a nun in the convent of Argenteuil. Many begged her not to set that yoke upon her youth; at which, amid her tears, she broke out in Cornelia's lament: 'O great husband! undeserving of my couch! Has fortune rights over a head so high? Why did I, impious, marry thee to make thee wretched? Accept these penalties, which I gladly pay.' With these words, she went straight to the altar, received the veil blessed by the bishop, and took the vows before them all.'

Abaelard's Historia calamitatum now turns to troubles having no connection with Heloïse: his difficulties with the monks of St. Denis, with other monks, with every one, in fact, except his scholars; his arraignment before the Council of Soissons, the public burning of his book, De Unitate et Trinitate divina, and various other troubles, till, seeking a retreat, he constructed an oratory on the bank of the Ardisson. He named it the Paraclete, and there he taught and lectured. He was afterwards elected abbot of a monastery in Brittany, where he discovered that those under him were savage beasts rather than monks. Here the Historia calamitatum was written.

The monks of St. Denis had never ceased to hate Abaelard for his assertion that their great Saint was not really Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach. Their abbot now brought forward and proved an ancient title to the land where stood the convent of Argenteuil, "in which," to resume Abaelard's account,

"she, once my wife, now my sister in Christ, had taken the veil, and was at this time prioress. The nuns were rudely driven out. News of this came to me as a suggestion from the Lord to bethink me of the deserted Paraclete. Going thither, I invited Heloïse and her nuns to come and take possession. They accepted, and I gave it to them. Afterward Pope Innocent II. confirmed this grant to them and their successors in perpetuity. There for a time they