legend of Abelard, a legend hardly less passionate, certainly not less
characteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhaeuser; how
the famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed,
pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the
house of a canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl
Heloise, believed to be the old priest's orphan niece, his love for whom
he had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so that
rumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling
her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a
sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise
sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature of
abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive
the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid
the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of
something like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to assign
its exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie on
the consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that he
composed many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sang
them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat, were
probably in the taste of the Trouveres, of whom he was one of the first
in date, or, so to speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit which
has moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of the
middle age. At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the next
generation raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the
"Mountain of Saint Genevieve," the historian Michelet sees in thought "a
terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops,
twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scholastic philosophy;
not only the learned Heloise, the teaching of languages, and the
Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia--that is to say, the revolution." And
so from the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we see that