The Streets of Paris

Louis had always been terrified of his mother, Blanche of Castile, who in turn taught him to be terrified of the devil who was everywhere. To protect his soul and safeguard his salvation, he wore a hair shirt, day and night, heard many masses, genuflected fifty times a night at bedtime, got out of bed at midnight to recite the matins part of the Divine Office, fasted and mortified his body to the effect of unhealthy thinness and a stooped posture.

The biblical stories contained in the windows—the childhood of Christ, the Passion of Christ, Saint John the Baptist, the Hebrew prophets Judith and Esther, the stories of Genesis and Exodus, in all 1,100 scenes from the Old and New Testaments—make visual the sources that aroused King Louis IX’s religious passion. In the sunlight, you can read the plots and characters of the stories—including one about Louis himself, in the last window on the right, dressed as a penitent, carrying the sacred relics on foot to Paris—and come to understand or at least visualize the myths and miracles fueling the faith of medieval Catholic Europe. Statues of the twelve apostles, Christianity’s founding fathers, surround the nave.

The walls of stained-glass windows blaze with gloriously rich sparkling colors. The colored light flooding the chapel, falling in gorgeous fragments on the chapel floor, leaves you without words. The blue has a mystical intensity. Medieval blue it’s called, evoking a harmonious mystical universe. The rose window, as you turn to look up at it, you face what seems a soaring variation on or perhaps the final explosion of the miracles that inspired this architecture. The colors express a faith so joyful and sure it seems to pulse in another world.

Then a dark stone corridor leads to the entrance of Sainte-Chapelle, the creation of King/Saint Louis IX (1214–1270). The chapel feels so recessed in the bowels of the ancient buildings, you feel as if you’ve come upon a royal secret from a faraway past.

The lovers of the Quai aux Fleurs ended as victims of the Church’s law of celibacy already on the books of canon law, its violation by a cleric a mortal sin, the penalty eternal hellfire. At the time that uncle Fulbert had Peter Abelard castrated, it was not clear whether Abelard had decided to choose the priesthood instead of Héloise. After the tragedy, the shamed husband’s only refuge seemed to be a celibate monastery.

For the rest of his life as teacher and writer, he was attacked and persecuted by jealous mediocrities, theologians, ambitious clerics, fanatics (Saint Bernard of Clairvaux) who convicted him of heresy and made him burn one of his own books. Abelard was lucky. A century later, he himself would have gone up in flames.

Héloise never wavered. To the end, she was a woman in love. No law or tradition or vow could crush her passion for Peter Abelard. Her intelligence, her refusal to be bullied into a fake repentance or conversion, and the intensity and warmth of her writing, place her front and center in a long line of bold, self-possessed French women, women who loved unconditionally. To this day she is a heroine of France.

The confusion of the historical record continues, but a few facts are clear. Abelard, impotent, left Paris, where overnight he’d become an object of pity, to become a monk at the Abbaye de Saint-Denis (now the Basilica of Saint-Denis), in northern Paris.

Héloise, fully aware of her hypocrisy, professed her religious vows in the convent that had been her childhood home. She was no nun. Always her heart and soul would belong to Abelard. “It was your command, not love of God, that made me take the veil.”

Fifteen years later, she came across a letter written by Abelard to a friend in which he recounts the joys and torments of his life. The letter of twenty thousand words—Historia Calamitatum Mearum (The Story of My Misfortunes)—is often referred to as Abelard’s autobiography or Confession. He writes about his passion for Héloise, the details of their lovemaking, the birth, the marriage, his castration, and their separation, Abelard retreating to the Saint-Denis cloister where he repented his sins of lust, Héloise to a convent where she, too, according to Abelard, had found comfort in religion. The passionate girl of the Quai aux Fleurs was now the abbess of her convent, highly respected by bishops.

Héloise’s response, in her first letter to Abelard since their separation, sets him straight. For her, nothing has changed since their ecstatic nights and days in Paris. She is possessed not by religion but by anguish and longing for him:

God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me forever it would be sweeter and more honorable to me to be not his empress but your whore.

In her next letter, the Abbess Héloise repeats that her sexual self is still her most essential self:

Even at Mass,… lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on my prayers. Everything we did, and also the times and places, are stamped on my heart along with your image … I live through it all again with you.

When Héloise became pregnant, Abelard disguised her as a nun and took her north to his native Brittany where their son, Astrolabe, was born. Later, on a return trip to Paris, he convinced her to marry him, to placate the insanely angry Fulbert who felt betrayed. In the Chapel of Saint-Aignan, Héloise, very reluctantly, whispered her marriage vows: “I looked for no marriage bond. I never sought anything in you but yourself.” She believed, rightly, that a married cleric could not rise in the Church, that their marriage, kept secret or not, would ruin his brilliant career. Nor was she drawn to the constrictions of married domesticity: she preferred “love to wedlock and freedom to chains.” Both lovers were aware of the Church’s esteem for clergy and monks as an elite body on the ground of their celibacy.

Ninon’s Paris now became the must-see city in Europe. The Tuileries, as the “first truly public Parisian garden,” became the “prototype for public gardens” all over Europe. A twenty-minute walk to the east of it, the Place Royale was described as “the most beautiful spot, not only in Paris, but in any city in the world.”1 And women, long cloistered like nuns and drones inside what Ninon saw as their domestic marital prisons, were allowed this beauty. A friend of the prolific letter-writer Madame de Sévigné (after she forgave Ninon for sleeping with her husband and son), Ninon, no doubt, joined her on the paths through the Tuileries (and the Place) where men and women walked and drank and talked together. Madame de Sévigné described it all in her famous letters to her daughter.2

As the relaxed gender relations of the Tournelles salon moved outdoors, liberating the pleasures of the streets, parks, and the royal Places, many of the writers who lived in rue des Tournelles, rue de Turenne, and rue de Béarn and hated the idea of ever moving away wrote about the crucial role that “proximity to a beautiful spot,” such as the Place Royale, played in their daily lives.3

Perhaps Ninon got some of her nerve from the currents of change moving Paris into the “modern” world, not just inside the Marais salons but in public, under the influence of the mover-and-shaker King Louis XIV. Absolutist in the practice of statecraft, when it came to the reputation of his city, he was determined to compete with the the rival cities of Europe. Throughout his long reign, in addition to waging hugely expensive wars and persecuting Protestants, he transformed Paris into a place of public pleasures and leisure. He broadened many streets, creating the first boulevards and getting rid of the garbage that had always been thrown in the gutters; he made carriage traffic practical, added street lanterns, and, thanks to the genius of his landscape artist André Le Nôtre who turned the Tuileries into a public park and promenade, he opened this former royal preserve to the working class who lived beyond the city center. Walking became the favorite Parisian leisure activity in Ninon’s day, enabling women to show off new dresses, and both sexes to flirt.

34, rue des Tournelles,