We have here the passages which have made Heloise an heroine in erotic circles for so many centuries. On these words, isolated from their context of religious horror and self-accusation, have Bussy-Rabutin, and Pope, and the rest, erected their gaudy structures; on them is grounded the parallel with Marianne Alcoforado, and Rousseau’s Julie, and so many other women who have meditated sin. Bayle has carried his Pyrrhonism so far as to doubt that ‘bodily integrity’ which she claims for herself with so little boasting; Chateaubriand, with broader and truer judgment, finds in the letter the mirroring of the soul of a good woman.
There can be little doubt that the optimism of Chateaubriand has for once come nearer to the truth than the cynicism of Bayle. The decadent admirers of Heloise forget three circumstances which should have diminished their equivocal adoration: the letter is from a wife to her husband, from a penitent to her spiritual guide—women say such things every day in the confessional, even in this very sensitive age—from a thoughtful woman to a man whom she knew to be dead to every breath of sensual love. There is no parallel to such a situation.
Further, it is now obvious that the romancists have done injustice to the soul of Heloise in their isolation of her impassioned phrases. She objectifies her love: she is not wholly merged in it. She never loses sight of its true position in her actual life. It is an evil, a temptation, a torment—she would be free from it. Yet she is too rational a thinker to turn to the easy theory of an outward tempter. It is part of herself, a true outgrowth of the nature God has given her; and between the voice of nature and the voice of conscience, complicated by the influence of conventual tradition and written law, her soul is rent with a terrific struggle. A modern confessor with a knowledge of physiology—there are a few such—could have led her into paths of peace without difficulty. There was no sin in her.