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"Oh! here, the affair is becoming tragic," cried the fair Heloise. "What is it all about?" "Madame drops down upon us like " "Like a dancer," said Heloise; "let me prompt you, missus!" "Come, I am busy," said Gaudissart. "The joke has gone far enough. Heloise, this is M. Pons' confidential servant; she had come to tell me that I must not count upon him; our poor conductor is not expected to live.
She may have had parents. There is no telling. She lived with her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Paris. I do not know what a canon of a cathedral is, but that is what he was. He was nothing more than a sort of a mountain howitzer, likely, because they had no heavy artillery in those days. Suffice it, then, that Heloise lived with her uncle the howitzer and was happy.
They had many a handle against Abelard: his private life, the scandal of his connection with Heloise, the restless and haughty fickleness of his character, laid him open to severe strictures; but his stern adversaries did not take so much advantage of them as they might have taken.
Here the historian ought to sketch this lady; but it occurs to him that even those who are ignorant of Sterne's system of "cognomology," cannot pronounce the three words "Madame de Listomere" without picturing her to themselves as noble and dignified, softening the sternness of rigid devotion by the gracious elegance and the courteous manners of the old monarchical regime; kind, but a little stiff; slightly nasal in voice; allowing herself the perusal of "La Nouvelle Heloise"; and still wearing her own hair.
She kissed her pallid cheeks, wet with tears, which lay by hers on the same pillow, and both remained silently brooding over the thoughts which spring from love and sorrow. "Happiness can never be mine, Amelie," said Heloise, after a lapse of several minutes. "I have long feared it, now I know it.
The evening was a very fine one, one of those delightful soft, clear skies usual at this season, the latter end of July. I sat myself down in the grotto of Héloïse, a spot of the deepest seclusion, formed, by the hand of Nature, of large masses of granite.
Will we not, Mere Esther?" said the Lady Superior, addressing Amelie rather than Heloise. "Not for me, reverend Mere; you shall kill no fatted calf, real or symbolical, for me!" exclaimed Amelie. "I come only to hide myself in your cloister, to submit myself to your most austere discipline. I have given up all. Oh, my Mere, I have given up all! None but God can know what I have given up forever!"
Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue, a facile master of versi d'amore, which he would sing with a voice wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age: Héloïse seventeen. Amor al cor gentil ratto s'apprende, and Minerva was not the only goddess who presided over their meetings.
The problems of philosophy and theology that were so vital in the Middle Ages interest us no more, even when they are less obscure than those so rife in the twelfth century, but the problem of human love is always near and so it is not perhaps surprising that the abiding interest concerns itself with Abélard's relationship with Héloïse. So far as he is concerned it is not a very savoury matter.
"Woman, fragile flower! why were you suffered to adorn a world exposed to the inroad of such stormy elements?" thought Maria, while the poor maniac's strain was still breathing on her ear, and sinking into her very soul. Towards the evening, Jemima brought her Rousseau's Heloise; and she sat reading with eyes and heart, till the return of her guard to extinguish the light.
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