A timeless love story?

Abélard and Héloïse's passionate affair in 12th-century Paris captured imaginations in France and far beyond. Yet, writes Yvonne Seale, there was a dark side to this true-life tale of forbidden love

- Yvonne Seale

Many millions of visitors have streamed through the gates of the sprawling Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris since they first opened in the early 19th century. Some come to pay their respects to the many modern cultural icons buried here, leaving flowers on the grave of the singer Édith Piaf or lipstick kisses on the monument to Oscar Wilde.

Some, though, are drawn to a memorial tucked away in a corner just to the right of the cemetery’s main entrance. This tomb supposedly houses the remains of two people who had already acquired semi-legendary status many centuries before the first grave was dug at Père Lachaise. It is the reputed resting place of the 12th-century abbess Héloïse of Argenteuil and her husband, philosopher Pierre Abélard.

The neo-Gothic tomb, with its effigies of the couple reclining peacefully, is a picturesque stone monument to love’s persistence. For that reason, it became something of a pilgrimage site in the 19th century. The writer Mark Twain rolled his eyes at the crowds of “memento-cabbaging vandals” who travelled to the tomb from all over France “to weep and wail and ‘grit’ their teeth over their heavy sorrows” and hope for beyond-the-grave intervention in their own unhappy love lives.

The story that draws so many visitors even today is a tale of a doomed clandestine medieval romance - that of Abélard, the rising academic star who fell for his most gifted student, Héloïse. It involves a forbidden love, a hidden pregnancy, a secret marriage, an escape in the guise of a nun, a castration, and a lengthy and final separation. If that precis reads like the plot of a television melodrama miniseries, it seemed no less sensational to people in the Middle Ages.