Friends, welcome to November. These days I reread one of the classics of English literature: William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. As you all know, Romeo and Juliet has not only become one of Shakespeare's best-known stories, but also one of the best-known romantic tragedies in world literature. Even talking about Romeo and Juliet is a leitmotif of forbidden and impossible love.

Those who do not all know, is that just like Romeo and Juliet, there are other literary characters who suffered the impossible love. This is the case, for example, of Mary and Ephraim in the novel Mary by George Isaacs; that of Lotte and Werther in The Misadventures of Young Werther' by Goethe; that of Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brönte; or one of the best known: Rhett and Scarlett in Margaret Michel's famous novel, Gone with the Wind.

We know that in many cases, real life serves as inspiration for writers who, seeing and living their environment, can create the most beautiful or terrible pieces of literature. Hence, it is important to know that, just as in literature, some thinkers, writers, artists and even heroes lived in their own flesh an impossible love that many times, as in Romeo and Juliet, led them to death.

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Based on this idea, I wanted to make several posts that talk about the most famous relationships of impossible love that some writers or universal thinkers suffered in real life. On this occasion I wanted to start with one of the saddest, most terrible, and most complicated relationships I have ever read and which are worth knowing. Rather than making a study or analysis (I'm not a psychoanalyst) of the relationship, what I'm going to try to do is tell you the story of these two lovers who saw their love impaired. Today I will tell you the story of Abelardo and Eloísa.

Before starting, I must say that there are many versions of this story, I focused on the one that repeats more and we know more. According to the story, Abelardo was born in 1079 in Palais, Upper Brittany, a village near Nantes. As a young man, Abelardo was assigned to the military career, which he later abandoned for study. He cultivated all the knowledge of his time, including music and singing. At the age of 20, Abelardo left for Paris, devoting himself to philosophy. He established a school on the hill of Santa Genoveva and attracted a large crowd of students from whom he deserved deep respect.

Due to Abelard's deep recognition and respect as a philosopher, Fulberto, canon of the Cathedral of Paris, requested the services of the famous master as guardian of his niece Eloise, a cultured and beautiful 17-year-old girl, who, having lost her parents, was entrusted to his custody. Eloise does not resist Abelard's intellectual fascination, so Eloise's initial intellectual admiration for her master becomes passion. And although Abelardo is not a novice in love relationships, he was 37 years old at the time, he cannot help but fall into the temptation that makes him forget any convention.

We know what happens every afternoon in Fulberto's house because Abelardo himself narrates it in "Historia Calamitatum" (known in Spanish as "Historia de sus desgracias" or "Historia de mis calamidades"), also known as Abaelardi ad Amicum Suum Consolatoria. The work, written in 1132 or shortly thereafter, is one of the first autobiographical works of medieval Western Europe, written in the form of a letter. Here is a quote from the text:

>The books remained open, but love rather than reading was the subject of our dialogues, we exchanged more kisses than wise ideas. My hands went more to her breasts than to books.

This illicit relationship was discovered by Fulberto when Eloisa became pregnant. Fulberto, upon learning of the affront, insisted that Abelardo make peace through marriage. Curiously, Abelard did not oppose it, but Eloisa did, because she did not want to stand in the way of the promising career of her love. In more than one letter he said that he would rather be his lover than be his wife and see his fame lost.

Finally Eloisa surrenders and marries, but in secret. It is said that Abelard and Eloise have a son named Astrolabes and leave him in the custody of a sister of the philosopher. When Abelardo returns to Paris, Fulberto waits for him to execute his great revenge. Bribing a servant, he enters Abelard's rooms, accompanied by his companions, and castrates him.
After this, although Abelard tried to make a normal life, his relationship with Eloise broke down, so Abelard humiliated decides not to see Eloise again and retires to a monastery. After this, Eloisa also does the same: she becomes a nun even though she never stops loving Abelard.

We must say that although Abelard and Eloise never saw each other again, they kept in touch by means of letters. In one of those many letters, Eloise confesses that Abelard's passion was only carnal:

The senses, and not the affection, have linked you to me. Yours was a physical attraction, not love, and when the desire was extinguished, with it also disappeared all manifestations of affection with which you tried to manifest your true intentions: even when I sleep, its fallacious images persecute me. Even during Holy Mass, when prayer should be purer, the dark ghosts of those joys take hold of my soul, and I can do nothing but abandon myself to them, and I cannot even pray. Instead of crying, repenting for what I have done, I sigh, lamenting for what I have lost. And in front of my eyes I always have not only you and what we have done, but also the precise places in which we have loved each other, the different moments we have spent together, and I seem to be there with you doing the same things, and not even when I sleep do I manage to calm down. Sometimes, from a movement of my body or from a word that I don't get to catch, everyone understands what I'm thinking about" (Letter IV).

At the end of his days, Abelard retired to the camp, where he founded a chapel, which he called "Paraclete", but his fame and his knowledge continued to attract many followers; finally, his enemies (just as numerous) headed by Saint Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and founder of the Cister, managed to accuse him of heresy and remove him from public life. He died resigned and separated from his beloved Eloise.

She later had him buried in the Paraclete, while at the same time asking to be buried next to him, in order to be able to remain always together. The Paraclete was suppressed in 1792 and sold in benefit of the State; but the revolution excepted from the sale the sepulchre that contains, according to general belief, the remains of Eloise and Abelard, that were transferred later to the cemetery of the father Lachaise in Paris, where at the moment they are. The correspondence between Eloise and Abelard is among the greatest works of French literature.

As you may have read, dear readers, reality sometimes surpasses fiction. There are some loves that seem to be drawn from tragic literature and like all tragic stories, they do not have a happy ending. This story is one of the many examples that we are going to review here so that we can know that not only Romeo and Juliet had an impossible love; there were also Abelardo and Eloísa who could never be happy.

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With these words I say goodbye, hoping you enjoyed reading and not before inviting you to vote for @adsactly-witness as a witness, and to join our server in discord. Until the next smile;)

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

https://www.topia.com.ar/articulos/la-filosof%C3%AD-y-la-pasi%C3%B3n-abelardo-y-elo%C3%ADsa
https://www.portalsolidario.net/ocio/visu/biografia.php?rowid=242
https://historiaybiografias.com/abelardo_aloisa/

Written by @nancybriti

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