Haron posted last month about the tale of Heloise and Abailard (or ‘Abelard’ as he’s perhaps more commonly known). I’ve recently been rather enjoying a wonderfully evocative  account of the early days of their relationship, from “Heloise. A biography” by Enid McLeod, published in 1938.

The author manages to describe emotions that those of us lucky enough to have made deep connections with kinky friends will recognise straight away.

She starts by explaining how Heloise’s family had educated her from an early age, even though “to give a girl such an education as Heloise received, or indeed any at all, was [an] unheard-of thing in the twelfth century.”

She moved to Paris, where she came to the attention of the leading teacher of the day:

Heloise had by then left childhood behind and was a young girl of sixteen or seventeen… Her unusual learning and distinction of mind had gradually made her known, and were soon so much talked about that her fame began to spread…

With such reports of her abroad in the land, it was hardly surprising that Abailard, too, heard at last of this astonishing young girl, who had been living so near of him in recent years, and whom he must surely have often seen, though he had never remarked her, in the streets of the Cloister… There is little doubt that, once his thoughts were set on her, he found that she quickly filled them.

So he hatched a cunning plan, involving her uncle, with whom she was living in Paris:

Fulbert doted on his niece, and was ready to do anything that would enable her to progress further in her studies… In his pride and pleasure at securing for Heloise the greatest master in the kingdom, and knowing Abailard’s reputation for continence, [he] at once entrusted his niece entirely to Abailard’s direction, urging him not only to spend with her every hour he could spare from his own work, whether it were by day or by night, but, if she should be idle or careless, to chastise her into obedience.

And so, from one day to the next, Heloise found that instead of being debarred by her sex… from that public participation in Abailard’s instruction to which the least worthy of his students could aspire, she had attained to such a position as his priveleged private pupil as such as not even the most deserving of them enjoyed.

Their interest was mutual:

Abailard soon succeeded in filling the thoughts of this young girl, in the midst of whose secluded life he had suddenly appeared… It was a passion of the body, most certain, but much more of the soul.

Each day, as soon as his work at the school was over, he hurried back to the house in the Rue des Chantres, where Heloise awaited gim with her books open on the table before her… [but] as Abailard himself admits, “Our books lay open… but we spoke more of our love than our reading, and there were more kisses than explanations. Our hands went to each other’s breast more often than to the books….

Sometimes too, he tells us, in order to disarm any possible suspicion on Fulbert’s part, and to make him believe that Abailard was indeed acting as the stern taskmaster that he had been empowered to be, he would beat Heloise so that the sound could be heard. But the blows thus given were given in love, not anger.

Eight hundred years later and it’s still hot. Perhaps we should all play spanking scenes re-enacting one of their tutorials, and report back in the comments?!