Farewell, My Only One: a Novel of Abelard and Heloise by Antoine Audouard

Author:Antoine Audouard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

We had mentioned these words the previous day and she had spoken them as a challenge and as a joke between us: the words Cornelia had spoken to Pompey, Heloise addressed to Abelard. There were no tears—she was superb and she was gone before he could say goodbye. She made a sign to him, as if she were stroking his cheek or his neck (these very simple gestures which they had been able to make freely, even up until the last night, and which from then on would only be made in dreams). Then she went on her way as the singing of the choir soared.

Three day later, in the basilica of Saint-Denis, I thought of this moment as I listened to Peter Abelard, who was on his knees in front of the magnificent cross of Saint-Eloi, surrounded by the glitter of gold and precious stones that were meant to suggest the shimmer of paradise, recite in his strong voice, the voice of a teacher, a passage of text that for once had not been written by him and in which he could not allow himself the slightest authorial affectation: ‘Before God and the holy martyrs Denis, Rusticus and Eleutherius, in the presence of my father Adam, I promise stability, a religious life and obedience according to the rule of St Benedict.’ Then he repeated three times the verse: ‘Raise me up, Lord, according to your word and I shall have life. Grant that I may not be confounded in your expectation.’

It seemed to me that on the third utterance (although I was already far away, walking backwards, through the darkness of a side chapel at the back of the church, and I was hearing instead the words of Heloise, my heart is not with me . . .) he paused before saying ‘in your expectation’, but it no longer mattered, for I was already pushing open the little door that opened onto the cathedral square, where I could hear the blare from the great market at the Saint-Denis fair. I had once and for all entered my state of solitude and turmoil, and what bound me to my master and to the woman he loved seemed—without my having been allowed to bid them one word of farewell—to have been destroyed for ever.

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