Nay, it is even the very cameo out of Tennyson:
“As when a soul laments, which hath been blessed, Desiring what is mingled with past years, In yearnings that can never be expressed By sighs, or groans, or tears.”
This is the heart which Abelard won. Winning it he won, and forever held, the woman whose it was. From that moment she merged her whole existence in his with a complete and utter abandonment of self, to the perfectness of which let her epistles from the Paraclete bear testimony. Across this story of undeviating devotion Abelard’s vanity, pride, and coarseness are written with smears and stains, like an illiterate monk who blots his comments upon a precious missal full of saints and angels. For, first of his offences, he revealed this love of his by really becoming a troubadour. He composed verses in the Romance tongue, recounting their loves, and set them to such stirring tunes that all the world was soon singing them. Hence grew the legend that the “Romance of the Rose” (_Roman de la Rose_) was his composition. It undoubtedly contains their story, but it was not his work; it belongs to William de Loris and Jean de Meung. But, as for Heloise, she was delighted. What would have been a crown of sorrow to other women was to her a crown of joy. She even announced to Abelard “with the utmost exultation” the advent of that unhappy being christened Astrolabe and destined to pass his forsaken and lonely existence shut up in a cloister. That people sang of this love; that it went to the ends of the earth; that nothing could prevent its being known—these were the happinesses of Heloise. Of the merit of the songs we cannot ourselves decide. They were originally anonymous, and only those familiar with the crabbed French of that period may hope to find them again.
Meanwhile, though the lectures suffered, and the students saw, and all Paris smiled, Fulbert was totally in the dark. This condition of affairs was predestined to come to an end, and it came in storm and anger. Abelard saw himself forced, against his will, to marry secretly. It was a sting to his egotism that ever rankled. It served, though, to pacify Fulbert and the rest of the relations; and being too glad and too loose-tongued to keep this handsome alliance from the public they presently told everybody. Heloise, thereupon, fearing for Abelard’s ambitious schemes, did not shrink from a point-blank falsehood. She denied the marriage. She had been in Brittany and was now at Argenteuil, of which she was by and by to become the abbess. And she added to her denial the self-abnegating sentiment that Abelard, who was created for all mankind, ought not to be sacrificed by “bondage to a woman.” It was worthy of her who so admired the “philosophic Aspasia,” and whose tutor and lover had done what he could to make her as “free from superstition” as himself. Her moral ideas were what he taught her, and he could not unteach them.