But Abélard prevailed. ‘Weeping and sobbing vehemently,’ he says, ‘she brought her discourse to an end with these words: “One thing alone remains for us now, we must exhibit in our common ruin a grief as strong as the love that has gone before.”’ It is an artistic termination to Abélard’s discourse, at all events.
Back to Paris once more, therefore, the two proceeded. Heloise had a strong foreboding of evil to come from the side of Fulbert; she did not trust his profession of conciliation. However, she left her boy, whom, with a curious affectation, they had called Astrolabe (the name of an astronomic apparatus), in the charge of Abélard’s sister Denyse. They were married a few days after their arrival at Paris. The vigil was spent, according to custom, in one of the churches: they remained all night in prayer, and the ceremony took place after an early Mass in the morning. Their arrival in Paris had been kept secret, and only Fulbert and a few friends of both parties were present at the marriage. Then they parted at the altar: the man weakly proceeding to follow his poor ambition in the school, the noble young wife making herself a sad sacrifice to his selfishness and irresolution.
During the next few dreary months they saw each other rarely and in secret. Abélard was a man of the type that waits for the compulsion of events in a serious conflict of desires, or of desire and duty. He could not lay aside his day-dream that somehow and some day the fates would smooth out a path along which he could carry both his whole ambition and his love. Events did decide for him once more. Fulbert, it seems, broke his faith with Abélard and divulged the marriage. But when people came to Heloise for confirmation, she did more than ‘lie with the sweetness of a Madonna,’ in Charles Reade’s approving phrase; she denied on oath that she was the wife of Abélard. Fulbert then began to ill-treat her (the circumstance may be commended to the notice of those historians who think he had acted from pure affection), and Abélard removed her secretly from her uncle’s house.
It was to the convent at Argenteuil that Abélard conveyed his wife this time. One passes almost the very spot in entering modern Paris by the western line, but the village lay at a much greater distance from the ancient island-city, a few miles beyond St. Denis, going down the river. It was a convent of Benedictine nuns, very familiar to Heloise, who had received her early education there. In order to conceal Heloise more effectually, he bade her put on the habit of the nuns, with the exception of the veil, which was the distinguishing mark of the professed religious. Here she remained for some months; Abélard waiting upon events, as usual, and occasionally making a secret visit to Argenteuil. According to Turlot, the abbess of Argenteuil was the mother of Heloise. We know, at least, that the nunnery was in a very lax condition, and that, beyond her unconquerable presentiment of evil, Heloise would suffer little restraint. Indeed, Abélard reminds her later, in his second letter to her, that their conjugal relations continued whilst she was in the nunnery.