began to laugh, then Arnold, and finally me. We laughed till the tears came and we had to stop.
‘The Virgin,’ said Christian, hiccupping.
We set off, still laughing, juggling the burning hot bread in our hands. A group of nuns looked at us disapprovingly.
‘It’s not particularly funny,’ I said eventually.
Arnold’s expression was always cheerful, but a cloud had already come over Christian’s face. The air reverberated with the sounds of the world awakening. Men were stretching and saying their prayers, others were opening their eyes to their hunger. How to go on living and hoping for one more day? The earth, newly drenched by the dew, gave off scents of the forest as well as the sewers of the city; by a curious effect of the dawn light, Notre-Dame seemed to be emerging like the mist from the ruins of Saint-Etienne.
‘Who would believe that the folly of wise men is more foolish than that of other men?’ said Christian eventually.
‘The folly of love – isn’t that what others call wisdom?’
‘No doubt. If he didn’t have so many enemies . . .’
‘His friends are more powerful than his enemies,’ said Arnold.
‘You know very well that he’ll be on his own at the end,’ Christian muttered.
‘That’s not true,’ said Arnold somewhat pompously. ‘I’ll be there, wherever I am.’
Christian grimaced in disbelief, perhaps a mite contemptuous. Arnold looked at him menacingly, a hand was raised, a punch was thrown. I had to shout at them to stop.
‘That’ll do!’
They glared at each other, this French lion and this Italian bee, with such hostility that it made me – and very soon them too – want to smile. We all embraced.
‘Are we going to wait by this door all day?’ Arnold asked.
‘No, open it,’ said Christian.
‘You do it.’
Arnold demurred.
‘What did the Child say?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you know? He was summoned to Vézelay. The prior died and they want to elect him.’
‘Our Peter, the Child who loves miracles?’
‘The very same. I don’t think we can go on calling him the Child . . .’
Arnold shrugged as he pushed open the front door. We followed him, climbing the stairs in silence. We found Peter Abelard alone, standing by the ashes in the hearth. The back of his powerful, rigid neck did not move. His black linen robe was crumpled like a sack. He did not look at us.
‘Peter?’
I spoke in a low voice – almost as if I didn’t want him to hear.
‘Peter?’
He did not stir.
‘Peter?’
‘Love – and do as thou wouldst.’
It was his voice – so deep that we scarcely recognised it – not the voice of the master but that of a man who has discovered an unknown country within himself.
‘I often wondered what that really meant . . .’
He turned towards us at last. Tears were flowing down the two vertical folds of his cheeks. His face had grown old. We had never seen him weep.
‘So that’s what it was . . .’
X
His expression changed over the course of the days. Tense, non-communicative and worn, he gradually relaxed and you could see expressions of a fleeting sweetness that were not at all like him. The songs of birds could be heard in his logical progressions.
The bishop had soon put a stop to the scandal caused by the lectures on the water. Not since Jesus himself had anyone dared take himself for Jesus in this way: they weren’t going to get involved in that business again, with all its complications! While waiting for a room to become available in its premises, the school had been moved to the far end of the Close, to the house of a canon who, after suffering terribly, had just died.
The devil would come to collect you a little earlier than expected and the dying might be overcome with convulsions and start uttering incoherent words as the flames burst from their mouths and their bodies began to burn. If they hadn’t made a full and sincere confession before dying, all that would remain of them was a pile of bones amongst ashes at the moment that their souls were cast into the depths of hell-fire; but if you prayed to Christ, intercession through the Father was certain, all your troubles were ended, a marvellous light came over your face and death came peacefully. This belief, which was more reliable than astronomy and geometry, was taught to me by Peter the Child, and before him by Andrew, and before him by my friend the priest – it was a belief that was as old as mankind.
The chapterhouse must surely have allocated these quarters to us out of spite: they were less than half the size of the previous school (whose walls were already filled to bursting), and they could only house a small number of those who wished to hear the master. Some of them spent the night outside the door to be sure of hearing him the following morning.
I have said that he had changed. Not everybody may have noticed this: he still had that freedom of expression that took your breath away, and that lack of patience with stupidity that so delighted us. ‘Stultus,’ he would mutter under his breath – nowadays there was less anger and less aggression, but an irony that was just as wounding.
Rumours quickly spread about his moving into Canon Fulbert’s house, but no more attention was paid to them than to any other news, and probably less than to the latest reports of skirmishes between Gerbert and the Chancellor, Stephen de Garlande. Men of God between themselves . . .
Heloise no longer came to the lectures and nobody saw them together, by day or by night. The canon told everybody at the chapterhouse that he had Aristotle living at his home, which was irritating though not surprising, for Fulbert loved to boast. Thus it was that Peter Abelard let his relationship be known in his own inimitable way.
On Monday, he used the following sentence as an example of grammar: ‘Peter loves his ladyfriend.’ On Tuesday, he followed this with: ‘Peter’s wife is his ladyfriend.’ On Wednesday, expounding on property and accident in Aristotle’s Categories – or Boethius’s commentaries on them, to be precise – he happened to remark: ‘Peter’s ladyfriend has blue eyes.’ And so it continued: by the end of the week the whole of the Île de la Cité was buzzing with the curious news that the man whom everyone believed had chosen chastity for ever was in love.
As was bound to happen, the only person not to know what was going on was Heloise’s uncle, who strolled about the Close with a cheerful expression while people muttered behind his back.
By chance, or it may have been a portent, it was at this time that the figure of Bernard of Clairvaux, with his hollow cheeks and his gleaming eyes, could be
