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...
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Heloise and Abelard's story was lost to time, apart from the few to whom it had been told and who passed it down from generation to generation within the Paraclete.
In 1497, centuries after the Paraclete's famed Abbott and Abbess had long since died and the spirit of their story had since become diluted in the passing of the years, the new generation of nuns thought it improper for the two to be buried together. Their remains were dug up and placed into separate plots.
The late 1700's, however, brought with it the French Revolution. Among the many changes France experienced as it moved from the Ancien Regime to a constitutional monarchy was its dechristianization. The revolutionaries sought to destroy churches, cathedrals, statues, and icons... The more radical among them sought the murder of priests and Bishops; and all members of the clergy left alive were required to swear an oath of fidelity to the new secular government. In Notre Dame, the famous "festival of reason" was held, commemorating France's freedom from the oppression of the Catholic church which had tithed its citizens to poverty and had controlled its monarchy. France would now be a secular state, and to solidify this movement toward modernity all of France's church properties were now up for public auction.
Such was the fate of the Paraclete.
Amidst the destruction of all traces of its religious past, however, the new secular owners of the Paraclete happened to stumble upon a well-guarded pile of letters.
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It is fitting, don't you think, that these letters should inspire the very group who wished destruction upon the Church its authors had belonged to? These letters had inspired both those inside and outside the church. They had inspired the pious members of the paraclete enough to keep their weathered pages so safe-guarded for six centuries!
The winds of time change many things. In the same city squares, priests were dying where heretics had once been burned at the stake. The evil of mankind, in every group and in every century, persists. But so does love. There is something universal that speaks through these letters. It is beyond division. It is beyond destruction. It is beyond titles and groups and beliefs.
It spans time.
It spoke to us then, and it speaks to us now.
And it spoke to Josephine Bonaparte, wife of France's new secular Emperor, when these letters - these famous letters between a monk and a nun found in the rubble of a destroyed church - were brought to her attention at the end of the revolution.
She was so moved by them that she ordered for their remains to be brought to Paris.
She ordered for them to be laid side by side once more.
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A monument for Heloise and Abelard was to be built in the great Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. They were to be laid there, commemorated into eternity, within the gates of the very city that had once shunned them.
These letters became public. They were published the country over, and inspired many great writers and artists throughout the emerging Enlightenment period - a period marking the sovereignty of Reason and the separation of Church and State. These lovers, born in the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances, had finally found an age that would understand them.
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