Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 42

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^^0£ular Culture Review

Calamitatum, or The Story of His Misfortune, written about 1132,
ostensibly to a friend in need of counseling.^ It is more likely
Abelard’s attempt to set the record straight, to tell the world his
version of his relationship with Heloise. He himself denies that
theirs was a love in the sense that we like to think of it: an
encompassing meeting of souls, minds, and bodies that transcends all
possible law. Abelard asserts that he was ready for this particular
sin of the flesh, and deliberately chose Heloise as his accomplice (66
ff). Once it was over, for him it was over. The reader thinks, or wants
to think, that he protests too much, that love for him must be the
same as love for us.
Heloise, in what is usually called The Personal Letters,^ does not
agree with Abelard's dismissal of the central issue of their mutual
lives. Love for her is a matter of eternal dimension, virtue a matter of
adhering to true love. It is her passion, her commitment that have
reverberated down through the ages to our own. It is she for whom we
feel the most human attachment, who stirs the depth of the popular
imagination to the point that films are still being made and novels
written about the star-crossed pair. It is her emotional power that
has built their ill fortune into an archetype that has been celebrated
for many centuries, including our own.
It may be a moot point to assert that we have come far from the
actuality of Heloise and her century: of course we have. Every
interpretation of Heloise and Abelard is bound to be colored by the
beliefs of the time in which it is n\ade. The true value of these
interpretations is not what they can reveal about Heloise and
Abelard; for that we have the primary texts and the surrounding
documents of the twelfth c e n t u r y T h e most profound value of
examining these latter-day interpretations of the pair is the light
they shed on the cultures which spawn them.
We have only to think of Alexander Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard" to
verify the aptness of this observation. The poem's rococo sensuality,
restrained by force into couplets, is typical of the best of its time.
Pope based his poem on John Hughes’ 1712 translation of F. N. Du
Bois' 1695 French version of the story, Histoire des amours et
infortunes d ’Abelard et d'Heloise. This was itself a fanciful
compendium of mistakes and fabrications based largely on the version
of the story created out of nearly whole cloth by Roger de Rabutin,
Count of Bussy, in 1687, intended to cheer up his own sixty-seven year