me go. He doesn’t ask anything.
Fiet amor verus,Qui modo falsus erat. Love that once was false will become true. OVID, The Art of Loving 8:2
VI
Arnold and I had left Saint-Lazare for the mouth of the Bièvre: there was a priory house there belonging to Cluny that had been put under the gentle jurisdiction of Peter the Child, and his only duty as far as the abbey was concerned was to send back reports on the follies of the Parisian masters.
The house particularly welcomed those pupils of Peter Abelard who were rather more than pupils, those who did not pay, those whom he used to take drinking, those who would desert him like all the others when times changed.
Without Abelard saying as much, perhaps without his even being aware of it, I felt that we were enjoying the benefits of a discretionary benevolence that allowed him both to teach in the Close and to be startlingly unconstrained in the words he used.
I used to enjoy spending time in the warehouse that opened onto the street, storage rooms in which a stone sculptor kept his statues while waiting for them to be painted. If I wished to be on my own, I would sometimes go and sleep there, clinging with one hand to St Sebastian’s arrows, the keys of St Peter or St Augustine’s book, dreaming or having nightmares while surrounded by actual biblical characters.
Amid all this sanctity there were a few profane subjects. Having spent so much time among statues, my hands had cupped the drooping breasts of a statue of Niobe mourning her children and seeking consolation. But here as elsewhere it was not wise to form attachments: no sooner had you confided in a prophet or an angel, or entrusted your fate to a king, than the following day he was sent into exile in some church or other.
At night, among this gathering, I seemed to see imperceptible movements which I tried to catch with one eye, but which always eluded me. Did these stone people touch one another or make love once the creatures of flesh and blood had at last left them in peace? It appeared unlikely – only the spirit still illuminated their lives. Clasped in Niobe’s arms, however, I did feel that with a few centuries’ patience she might have been mine.
Peter’s friends had accepted me from the moment I joined them; this may have been kind-heartedness, but it might also have been casualness; I believe it was simply that the master had chosen me and that there was nothing more to be said.
Arnold spoke to me about his dreams: I feared for his purity which would later be his downfall, and I was alarmed by what he remembered from the lessons – not logic or reason, but fire to enflame his fury. I noticed that he was often in conflict with Cervelle, that ageless boy with the ugly but intelligent face, who used his mind to put an acceptable distance between himself and the world. Cervelle never spoke of what he believed in, he never admitted that he was frightened or in love; of all of us, he was the only one whose mind was sufficiently agile to drive Abelard into entrenched positions on rare occasions. Christian had a luminous faith and sweetness about him; although he lived an angelic life, he did not believe that the body was the enemy of the soul.
Peter the Child was wholly good.
When the master asked me to stay behind, the others withdrew without saying anything. After the lesson he took me with him and we would wander off to the Isle of Jews or the Isle of Cows and laze about together on a sandbank. During the night he dictated his notes for future treatises and tried new arguments or fresh analogies on me; I would reply and encourage him, timidly to begin with, then with increasing boldness. Watching the assurance with which, in front of everyone, he subsequently developed what we had attempted by trial and error, I felt a pride in my heart at having been singled out.
One day, Cervelle, with his customary irony – sardonic and ungenerous, but always fair – began calling me John. When, pretending not to mind, I asked him why, he sniggered:
‘Are you not the disciple whom Jesus loved?’
‘I must have her,’ said Abelard slowly, separating each word.
Tears, which I immediately held back, welled up in my eyes.
‘William, I need her,’ he repeated as if in a dream – and there was no need for him to utter her name. I knew.
Heloise had sometimes come to listen to him. As far as I knew, they had not exchanged more than three words.
A sort of routine had become established between her and me that I found impossible to break: we would walk together a little at the end of the lesson before she disappeared, giving the excuse that she could not keep her uncle, the canon, waiting. Whenever I was with her, the words that I had promised myself I would say the previous night vanished, and I was left speechless as a mule.
She told me about her life in snatches: she described her vast childhood home, at Montmorency, surrounded by vineyards, and the gut-wrenching pain she experienced when as a girl she was sent away to board with the nuns at Argenteuil. She remembered that on the morning of her death, her mother, Hersende, had put a flower in her hair: in the evening the flower was no longer there. She spoke of Dido, of Cornelia, and of the heroines whose destinies rent her heart and seemed, without her understanding why, to conjure up her own fate. Her Latin was elegant and classical – images sprang forth effortlessly from her lips. She had chosen her friends: she could express the music of Virgil or the almost vulgar enthusiasm of Catullus, the elegance of Horace, the sadness of Ovid. She did not speak about Abelard – and I never questioned her.
‘It’s unreasonable,’ I eventually said to my master.
‘You’re talking about reason?’
A strange paralysis gripped my heart and mind and made me incapable of uttering simple words. This object you’re playing with, just as you do with the Categories of Aristotle, has for the past fortnight been the blood pumping through my veins, the air that I breathe . . . This woman, whom you want to take away from me and who does not belong to me is, nevertheless, mine . . . You are my master in all matters, you know what I know better than I do myself, but you are taking away what you have given me, and worse still – you are stifling me, crushing me, draining my life away . . .
I had said nothing. Only that wretched remark ‘It’s unreasonable’, which made no sense at all and, more to the point – as I knew only too well already – would only provoke him.
It was only later that I became aware of everything that silence signified – and that ultimately my fate, my wretchedness and perhaps my good fortune were contained there in their entirety.
I did not see Heloise in the days that followed. I did not know what to expect, what to fear. If she went away, I would be protected from my master’s unbearable threat; if she came no more, my love would be fixed in an absence, in a dream. And yet, of course, as I waited for her, I retained neither much logic, nor much grammar.
We were a noisy group, happy but chaotic, and after our lesson we never tired of continuing to argue and discuss things as we crossed the square in front of the cathedral, jostling some of the shopkeepers as we turned into the Jewish quarter before passing the Petit Pont, where some new masters had already installed themselves, attracting the curious with strange syllogisms.
With Arnold, I instigated rebellious tactics to eliminate the transgressions of this base world; with Christian, I spoke about Heloise – not, God forbid, my silent passion, but about the curious attachment the master had developed for this girl whom he did not consider beautiful.
‘He will have her,’ said Christian fatalistically. ‘We must just pray
