One of the stops on my walking route through the two islands on the Seine is Rue des Chantres, which offers a gorgeous view of Notre-Dame Cathedral in all its glory. But this street has more to offer than just a pretty view: it also holds a remarkable love story between two lovers who, in life and in death, were never truly apart.
Abelard and Heloise fall in love
At number 10 on this street stood the home of Canon Fulbert, one of the clergymen who ran Notre-Dame Cathedral. In 1118, his 17-year-old relative Heloise came to live in his house, and since she was highly intelligent, Fulbert decided to hire the services of Pierre Abelard, one of the leading lecturers at the University of Paris (the future Sorbonne), who happened to also be handsome and charismatic. As a result, Heloise fell for him starting with their very first lesson, even though he was twenty-two years older than her.
That’s how a passionate love affair began between the teacher and his student. Pierre wasn’t known for his discretion, and after he “ran off to tell a friend,” the affair eventually came to Fulbert’s attention, who threw Abelard out of his house. But by then it was already too late: Heloise turned out to be pregnant with Abelard’s child. She was sent to Brittany, where she gave birth to their son, whom she named Astrolabe, after the instrument used to locate the position of celestial bodies. Meanwhile, Fulbert kept plotting his revenge for the “disgrace to his family’s honor.” One day, as Abelard returned home, he was attacked by a group of thugs hired by Fulbert. These men weren’t satisfied with just beating Abelard badly: they also decided to castrate him, so that he could never again act on his physical love for Heloise.
Abelard and Heloise keep moving (more than once)
Despite his physical disability, Abelard’s love for Heloise lasted until his death in 1142, at age 63. In 1164, Heloise died at that very same age, and before her death she asked to be buried in Abelard’s grave at the Paraclete monastery, which he himself had founded. The bodies of the two lovers lay together in the same coffin until 1497, when the nuns decided this wasn’t proper and buried the two lovers in separate graves in the Petit Moustiers chapel. In 1792, Abelard and Heloise “moved house” again, when the revolutionaries decided to reunite the two lovers in a single coffin with a divider inside. If you thought the lovers’ remains had finally found some peace, you’d be wrong.
In the early 19th century, Père Lachaise Cemetery was established in eastern Paris. Since the cemetery stood in a poorer part of the city and had never been consecrated by the Church, the well-off bourgeois of Paris kept their distance (or rather, kept their bodies away) from it. In an act of marketing genius, the cemetery’s owners realized that everyone wants to live near famous people, and if they can’t afford to do it in life, they’ll happily settle for doing it in death. So they decided to move there the graves of the playwright Molière, the writer La Fontaine, and finally the grave of Abelard and Heloise too. And the trick worked beyond anyone’s expectations. In 1817, when the lovers’ grave was moved to Père Lachaise, the cemetery held fewer than 1,000 graves; by 1830, it already held more than 33,000. Today, close to a million people are buried there, and the list of celebrities resting at Père Lachaise is a long one.
As for Abelard and Heloise? They’ve been lying together, undisturbed, for close to 200 years now, not far from the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors. I wonder if they like their neighbors.
Want to read more about Abelard and Heloise?
Don’t miss Dani Ashkenazi’s wonderful article, Abelard and Heloise: The Love Letters That Survived for Almost a Thousand Years.
