Peter Abelard, one of the most famous teachers in Paris, knew of his future pupil before he met her. He wrote afterwards that she was supreme in the abundance of her learning, and Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, later told her that he had known of her reputation since his youth. Heloise had been schooled by the nuns of Argenteuil, outside Paris, and her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, engaged Abelard as her tutor in the 1110s. What followed was retold for centuries as a romance: an affair, a son named Astralabe, a marriage kept secret, and the night when men sent by Fulbert castrated Abelard. He became a monk at Saint-Denis, and on his order she became a nun at Argenteuil. The poet Jean de Meun put the story into the Roman de la Rose in the thirteenth century, Alexander Pope made a poem of it in 1717, and in 1761 Rousseau named a novel after her.
What survives in her own words is an argument. In the early 1130s Abelard's account of his misfortunes reached her by chance, and she answered it in three letters. Their claim is that an act is worth what the person meant by it, and that what other people can see proves nothing. She reminded Abelard that she had argued against marrying him: a woman who marries a man for his wealth, she wrote, is offering herself for sale, and she would rather be called his whore than the empress of Augustus. She then judged her own life by the same measure. She had taken the veil at his command and not for the love of God, so she expected no reward from God for it. People praised her chastity, but she called herself a hypocrite, because chastity belongs to the mind and her mind still returned to what they had shared.
Abelard's Ethics, written before 1140, rests on the same principle: deeds are indifferent in themselves, and the intention alone decides whether an act is good or bad. Recent scholars, the historian Constant Mews among them, treat the idea as one the two held in common and give Heloise a share in it. For a long time she was given none. From the early nineteenth century some scholars doubted that she had written her letters at all, and in 1972 the historian John Benton argued that the whole collection was a later forgery. He withdrew part of that case in 1980, and most scholars now accept the letters as hers.
Her third letter carries the argument into the convent. The Rule of Benedict, which nuns vowed to follow exactly as monks did, was written for men. She listed the parts of it that a woman cannot keep, pointed out that outward observances are common to hypocrites and the devout alike, and asked Abelard for a rule made for women. He wrote one, along with hymns, sermons and a history of nuns. Some years later she sent him forty-two questions about contradictions and difficulties in the Bible, gathered by her and her nuns, and asked for his answers.
By then she had a house to govern. In 1129 Suger, the abbot of Saint-Denis, had the nuns expelled from Argenteuil, and Abelard gave them the Paraclete, an oratory he had built near Nogent-sur-Seine in Champagne. Heloise led it as abbess for more than three decades, and under her it founded daughter houses. Abelard died in 1142 in a priory of Cluny, and his body was taken to the Paraclete for burial. She died in 1164 and was buried beside him.