Peter Abelard

by Helen Waddell

  “It is not that,” said Geoffrey. He straightened himself, and stood looking at Pierre de Montboissier.

  “Well. I attended Palestrina on his way to robe himself, and then I came away. I saw Alberic and Lotulf whispering in the cloister, but I thought nothing of it. Natural enough that the hounds should snarl when the stag has taken to the water. I did not wait long with Abelard—he was lodging in St. Jean des Vignes close by—postponed our merry-making till that night when the Council would have risen. I came back, thinking I would listen to the Mass of the Holy Ghost with a deal more devotion than I had so far. Just as I reached the cathedral cloister, I saw Alberic and Lotulf come out of the sacristy door. They spoke a moment, then Lotulf went across to the singing-school and Alberic hurried in. But I had seen their faces. I made all the speed I could: but just as I got to the sacristy door, I heard the roar of the organ. I was too late. The procession had begun.”

  He sat down again and covered his face with his hands.

  “Exsurgat Deus—Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered. If ever a man committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, it was myself listening there. Palestrina’s little secretary was fidgeting about, laying by the robes, and I seized on him. He used to be a scholar of Master Peter’s, long ago, when he taught at St. Geneviève, and he had listened with all his ears. The pair of foxes had cornered old Ralph. They had told him he would be the laughing-stock of France if he suffered the matter to go beyond his jurisdiction: that Paris would fight for her man against Rheims: that he was Primate of France, and was Rheims to go to school to Paris to learn theology and canon law? And with that, old Ralph, all his hackles up, charges down on Palestrina. Palestrina, it seems, showed some fight: but with a good deal of to and fro, it was agreed that without further discussion Peter Abelard was to be condemned because he had lectured in public upon, and had put into circulation, a book that had received the imprimatur neither of the Roman Pontiff nor of the Church: that the example would be of great avail to the faith and a warning against similar presumption in future. The book was to be burned: and Abelard committed to perpetual imprisonment in St. Médard.”

  He was silent again. Pierre had moved into the shadow behind the chimney, and had turned his face to the wall.

  “There was nothing to be done but let the farce play itself out. I hurried back to Abelard.”

  Again he stopped.

  “I told him with all the force I could that he had better submit. That violence on his part would only mean . . . God knows what humiliation. You know that yourself, Pierre.”

  There came a muffled assent.

  “Technically they were in their rights, and Abelard had promised at the beginning to abide by the Legate’s decision. Let him take his sentence, and I swore to him on my honour that by the morning France would be ringing with it. They would be taken in their own net, branded for the jealous dunces that they were. As for perpetual imprisonment, Palestrina had been driven to it, and in a day or two, once he was clear of Rheims, would give the order for his release. I had only time to say it, when the summons came from the Council, for Abelard.”

  Again the silence fell. Gilles’ eyes were fixed on the darkness beyond the candlelight. He saw the serried faces in their stalls, complacent and greedy for the show; Palestrina flushed and angry with himself and everybody else: Alberic sleek in his doctor’s robes. He saw the brazier of burning charcoal. But the solitary figure standing by it he would not see.

  “Well, he burnt his book.” Geoffrey laughed shortly. “And to make the farce complete, while it was crackling there, and not a sound in all the cathedral, one of the fools standing by mutters that he thought he had seen in the book that God the Father alone was omnipotent. Palestrina pricked up his ears; anything to ease that old seared politician’s conscience of his. ‘Surely you are mistaken,’ he booms out, ‘for every schoolboy knows better than that. For it is the common article of faith to hold and profess that there are three omnipotents.’”

  “Good God,” said Gilles, under his breath.

  Geoffrey looked at him under his eyebrows and nodded.

  “There was a squeak of laughter somewhere at the back, and then a horrid silence. And then my own familiar devil, Thierry of Chartres, says, as if to himself, but in just that intoning chant of the creed that carries to every corner of the cathedral, ‘Yet are there not three omnipotents, but one Omnipotent.’”

  “That would help Abelard’s cause,” said Gilles grimly.

  “I thought Palestrina would have a seizure,” said Geoffrey, “and as Thierry’s bishop, I called him to order pretty fiercely, but Thierry’s blood was up: after all, he is a Breton himself.

  “‘O fools,’ he shouted, ‘that neither know nor seek the truth, and have condemned a son of Israel. Return to judgment and judge the judge himself, that ye chose for the instruction of faith and the correction of error, for out of his own mouth is he condemned. By God’s mercy, as once Susanna was delivered from her accusers, set this innocent man free!’”

  Pierre’s eyes in the dark of the chimney-corner shone like a wolf’s.

  “By that time, I think the only man unmoved was Abelard himself. He stood there, like a man in stone, watching his parchments burn. Then old Ralph heaves himself up, to save His Eminence’s face, for Palestrina was past speech.

  “‘In very truth, my Lord,’ says he, ‘the Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, and the Holy Ghost is omnipotent, and whoever dissents from this, he hath erred and gone out of the way. But now, if it please you, it were well that our brother should expound his faith in presence of us all, that it may be approved or corrected as shall be just and right.’ I could see Alberic’s jaw drop, for this was not according to plan.

  “Ralph sat down, looking at Peter, but Peter gave no sign of having heard. I do not think he had. ‘Speak, my son,’ says the old man, leaning forward. Peter looked up at him, dazed. ‘Speak, my son,’ says he again.”

  Geoffrey stopped.

  “It was Lazarus come back from the dead. If you have seen despair when it begins to hope—— I could have risen in my seat and shouted, for I knew the day was ours if he once began to speak. But so did Alberic. He was muttering in the Archbishop’s ear, and the old man rises again to his feet and makes a motion to Peter to wait.

  “‘My son,’ says he, ‘all that is required of you is that you shall but make the profession of your faith in the words of the Athanasian Creed.’

  “I saw Peter’s hands begin to shake, but he made no sign. He stood up there before them all, his face like a mask.

  “‘Quicunque vult,’ he began, but his throat was dry, and he had to swallow once or twice. And suddenly there was Alberic’s smile beside him, and the pudgy hand holding out the book, as you might to a stumbling choir-boy, open at the Creed. I had prayed for nothing since I sat down among that accursed crew but that he should come through it without breaking. But he broke then.”

  He got up abruptly and walked over to the window. For a while he stood there, looking out into the August twilight. Then he turned. The other two had not stirred.

  “However, Alberic had over-reached himself at last. Palestrina’s own voice was shaking, when he gave the benediction and dissolved the Council. I saw Abelard for a moment, before Geoffrey of St. Medard took him. Then I waited to try to see Palestrina alone, but the others were glued to him. I rode as far as Vierzy last night. To-night I must see the Bishop here—you will help me there, Gilles. And to-morrow, I must ride on to Sens.”

  Gilles sat silent, looking straight before him.

  “They will do what they will do,” he said at last, in a strange toneless voice. “But I know this. I shall not live to see it, nor you, Geoffrey, nor even Pierre maybe. But when this generation is dead, the youngsters in Paris will be reading his books, though some other name will be upon them, and they will be taught by the men that Abelard taught to think, though they
will not name his name. And some day, it may be a hundred years from now, it may be two hundred, but some man will speak again of reason and authority, as he did, and will bring together the whole Summa of theology by just such methods as his, and they will write that man’s name in the Calendar of Saints and they will handle his book as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. But meantime they will have hounded Abelard to death.”

  After a long silence, Geoffrey spoke.

  “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if it die——”

  Pierre de Montboissier had sprung to his feet.

  “You know nothing about him,” he cried. “He was never your master,” and with that he went hurriedly from the room.

  CHAPTER II

  Thibault was fishing. Just below the rocky hillock where he and Master Peter had built their huts and their thatched oratory, the Arduzon made a great pool. Honeysuckle and alders hung over it, giving good cover to the fisherman, and great boulders lay in the pool, giving good cover to the trout. There was no sunlight, this first of November, but there was a glow in the air, a diffused reflection from the oaks and beeches of the forest that stood up like golden fountains, and the brambles that burnt along the ground like creeping fire. Thibault’s heart was light, and as he listened to the faint clink of a chisel on stone from the hill above him, he blessed God and his uncle Thibault of Champagne, who had given Master Peter this place.

  For Thibault himself, he asked nothing better than that they should live here for ever, they two, until they died. Master Peter, it seemed to him, had braved the world long enough, and the world had very nearly broken him. There was that damnable trial for heresy, to begin with. And though Ralph of Rheims got red in the face when it was spoken of, and it was only a few weeks till Palestrina had him released from the penitentiary and returned to St. Denis, it had done something to his master. He was different. Thibault used to be a sound sleeper, though not so sound as before that night—Thibault crossed himself: he had asked old Herluin at Coincy to say a Mass on All Souls’ for poor Guibert—but now night after night he wakened with Master Peter crying out in his sleep, shouting sometimes that he was no heretic, arguing interminably with someone he called Gosvin, or, worst of all, moaning to himself. Once he had cried out, a terrible bitter cry— “Christ, where wert Thou?” in a voice like the cry from the Cross. But in the day-time he was very gentle, only given to long fits of brooding.

  And then there was the trouble at St. Denis, whatever it was, some argument that Thibault never rightly got to the bottom of, about whether St. Denis was Dionysius the Areopagite or not, and whether the Venerable Bede who said he was not was more to be believed in than the Abbot Hilduin who said he was, and had gone to Greece to make sure. As a Frenchman, Thibault inclined to the Abbot Hilduin, as against the Englishman: but if Master Peter preferred Bede, he was right: and he could not see why the Abbot Adam had made such a pother about it, talked even of treason and of handing him over to the King’s justice for miscalling the patron saint of France. Abbot Adam would have liked to see Master Peter broken on the wheel, like enough. It was a January night, Thibault remembered, when he waited with two horses below the wall at St. Denis, and some decent brother inside let Master Peter down by a rope, and they had ridden down to Provins together, and Master Peter had been taken in by the brethren at St. Ayoul. And then, though Count Thibault had done what he could, Abbot Adam very nearly had him back again. They would have beaten him to death, thought Thibault, or starved him to death: he was only a handful of bones when he took him in his arms from the rope that night. It was God’s mercy that let fly a stroke on Abbot Adam, after too hearty a meal, and with a good deal of to do Suger, the new Abbot, had consented to set Master Peter free, on condition that he went to no other abbey. It seemed odd, thought Thibault, that they could neither live with him nor without him. But anyhow they were determined that nobody else should make a boast of having him.

  At any rate, he was free for ever and ever of St. Denis. Thibault’s uncle had wanted to make him his chaplain: it was a sin, he said, that a man with an eye for a hawk like his should ever have been a monk: and when Master Peter had reminded him in plain terms of the bar to his ordination, Thibault had got red in the face and said it was a queer thing they’d ordain a goose-brained block like his nephew, and swore that Master Peter should have his pick of Champagne, and found an abbey of his own, if he liked. And when he had chosen the little tongue of ground at the edge of the forest, almost an island with the tiny reach of the river that looped round it, though in a dry summer it was only a gravel-bed with a few pools, Thibault had given it to him in perpetuity.

  “I’ll be none the worse,” said he, “of a holy hermit on my doorstep to say an odd prayer for me now and again.”

  That was what they would be, Thibault thought. Master Peter would live here, like St. Jerome in his cave, and he would be the lion that brought home the wood. In a year’s time he would be old enough to be ordained, and could say Mass in the oratory, instead of they two having to walk to Coincy: for his master had an odd shrinking from strangers. Master Peter would read and write, while he swept the floor and baked the bread and fished and hoed the plot that he must soon fence in to keep the hens from scrabbling in it. They had done well, the sitting he had got from Hugh the Forester’s wife, though it was full late in the year. He would have half a dozen pullets out of them, and a cockerel or two, that he would kill for Martinmas, and another for Christmas. Thibault frowned a little, thinking of the winter. Master Peter was always better when he could be out and about, and doing something with his hands.

  He had never been so well as when they were building their huts. They had brought the reeds from the reed-bed down the Arduzon, near St. Pierre de Boissenay. Thibault had been surprised to see how handy Master Peter had been with the thatching, but he said he used to help Goose-Foot the Thatcher when he was a youngster in Brittany: and he had spent hours making a pattern in the thatch along the eaves of the oratory, while Thibault daubed the walls with mud to make them wind-proof. They would be busy for another while digging the ground for the spring sowing, though Master Peter had small strength for the digging, but came patiently after, crumbling the clods, and throwing lame Thomas the worms. But when the rain and the frost would come, and they could do little but sit and look at one another over the fire? For Master Peter read little these days. He would take out his books, but Thibault saw him sit hour after hour and never turn a page. And he wrote not at all. However, Thibault was determined that he would make a search that day when he went back to his father’s at Provins. He remembered a chest full of old parchments with the ink very faint. Parchment was dear, but if he had some pumice stone and scraped them, Master Peter could write on these. He would be happy, if only he would begin to write. Meantime, the figure he was making in stone of the Holy Trinity, to put above the altar in their oratory, would keep him busy for a long while. Thibault calculated it, contentedly.

  Three trout: that must do, though he would like to have waited for the great fellow under the stone. He had seen him there. They had seen each other, that was the worst of it. Thibault sighed: he could have sat all day watching the slim, grey ghosts flit through the pale water. It was a better day than yesterday: there had been too much sun. He wound up his line, cleaned his three trout with an expert finger, and threw the guts to Thomas, the lame duck that he had brought up himself, ever since the clumsy hen who had hatched them out stood on him and crushed his leg. Thomas walked behind Thibault everywhere, sitting with his yellow eye fixed on him as he thatched or dug, and now followed every movement of the rod as intelligently as Thibault himself. Thomas had nothing to do with his brethren, now peacefully asleep on the further bank, their bills reversed on their backs. Queer, thought Thibault, how they sleep in the middle of the morning: but then, they are early risers and late walkers. Thomas unluckily made noises of gratification over his meal; in a trice every head came undon
e and the whole fleet were paddling across the river and falling over one another up the bank. With a frightful effort Thomas spooned up the last fragment and stood, blinking but triumphant. Thibault stooped to pick him up, and climbed up the track. Odd, he thought, as the indignant quacking died behind him to a soft gabble, that Master Peter should dislike the sound so. It seemed to Thibault one of the pleasantest noises in the world. However, though he had not liked the idea of their having ducks, he had grown fond of them when they first came out, would sit for long enough watching their solemn antics. And to Thomas he had become as attached as Thibault himself.

  The clink of the chisel had been silent for some time, Thibault realised uncomfortably. However, his foot snapped a twig as he came up the track, and it began again. As he came through the hazel copse into the clearing, Abelard was working with an air of great cheerfulness at a fold of God the Father’s cloak.

  “What do you think of it, Thibault?” said he, stepping back. “You see, the cloak is to fall over both their shoulders, the Son on one side, and the Holy Ghost on the other.”

  “There’ll be nothing better at Chartres,” affirmed Thibault, regardless that the faces of the Trinity were still blank masses of stone. “I’ll be curious to see the Holy Ghost. I’ve never seen a likeness of him to my knowledge, unless as a kind of a bird, like.”

  Thomas wriggled, and flopped unwieldy to the ground. A gleam came into Abelard’s eye.

  “We’ll not ask Thomas to sit, anyhow,” said he.

  The joke, and above all the fact that Master Peter was again making a joke, enchanted Thibault. He bellowed with laughter, and Master Peter joined in, the more at the stony stare which Thomas fixed upon them.

  “Look here, Thibault,” said he, “that fowl of yours is getting too serious. It’s exactly the Blessed Gosvin’s eye, when I used to make a joke in the old days at St. Geneviève.”

  “Thank God he’s greedy,” said Thibault. “He nearly burst himself getting the last of the trout guts down before the others could reach him. Three trout. I thought they’d do for our suppers.”