Eloise and Abelard

Yesterday was Saint Valentine's day and as this week I am working a couple of doors down from this plaque, I thought it was a fitting photo.

In a letter to Abelard, Heloise wrote: "You know, beloved, as the whole world knows, how much I have lost in you, how at one wretched stroke of fortune that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self in robbing me of you; and how my sorrow for my loss is nothing compared with what I feel for the manner in which I lost you."

After Heloise had had a child (curiously named Astrolabe) she went to stay in a convent with some nuns. However, her uncle and kinsmen believed that Abelard had cast her off and determined to punish him as follows:

"Violently incensed, they laid a plot against me, and one night while I all unsuspecting was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they broke in with the help of one of my servants whom they had bribed. There they had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful punishment, such as astounded the whole world; for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow. "

So, it's not certain whether the "loss" was the couple's separation or something else.