A re-telling of the true 12th century love story of Heloise and Abelard. Abelard is a great philosopher and theologian who has taken, like many academics of the time, a vow of celibacy. When he is hired as a tutor for the brilliant and beautiful Hel...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
━━━━━━━┛ ✠ ┗━━━━━━━━
The History of My Calamities. What a thing to title a memoir!
It is an awful and self-indulgent (as was his style) drone on and on about the misfortunes my dear Abelard faced. Among them, someday, he would place me.
But not yet.
Before I tell you what is to come, though, you must read it first from his own words. He was a poet, see? When I read these lines, I feel he is here with me again. He lives on, for me, in his syllables.
His writing is so vivid yet so concise, I do not know how he walks on the fine line between them. I have always been more eloquent, more flowery, in my verse. But these words... they are all his. Every last beautiful drop of them.
I can still hear the way he would have said them to me, bestowing caresses upon caresses over me while he did so, as if both words and touch were equally his poetry.
As to be expected, he begins his chapter here with the most boastful of brags: that he could have had any woman he wanted in all of Paris. It was true. He goes on to say how he wanted only me, even before we had met. He had heard of me, had seen me... he had deemed me "most worthy of renown" in the entire Kingdom. Someday many years later he would argue - repent, even! - that he had seduced me. You remember, though, just how wrong that was. I wanted him with a determination like fire since I first saw him.
Silently, at first, we pined after each other - each one oblivious to the desires of the other.
He is amazed at Fulbert's willingness to leave us alone day in and day out, but for this he thanks his fine reputation. You see, as he divulges here, he had never lain with anyone before. It was a respectable mark of a man, to be able to say such a thing truthfully.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Why should I say more?" he begins; it's a curious start. It is beyond words, what comes next in his story. It is beyond words for me too - it is a flickering series of moments, of memories, bathed in heavenly light; I feel them still in all of my veins.
"We were united first in the dwelling that sheltered our love, and then in the hearts that burned with it. Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words. Our hands sought less the book than each other's bosoms -- love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson drew them to the pages of our text... What followed? No degree in love's progress was left untried by our passion, and if love itself could imagine any wonder as yet unknown, we discovered it. And our inexperience of such delights made us all the more ardent in our pursuit of them, so that our thirst for one another was still unquenched."
Still, and forevermore, it is unquenched.
━━━━━━━┓ ✠ ┏━━━━━━━━
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
