Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
He was a brilliant 39-year-old philosopher and logician with a reputation for controver-
sial ideas. She was the beautiful niece of a canon at Notre Dame. And like Bogart and
Bergman in Casablancaand Romeo and Juliet in Verona, they had to fall in love - in
medieval Paris of all damned times and places.
In 1118 the wandering scholar Pierre Abélard (1079-1142) found his way to Paris,
having clashed with yet another theologian in the provinces. There he was employed
by Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame to tutor his niece Héloïse (1101-64). One thing led to
another and a son, Astrolabe, was born. Abélard married his sweetheart in secret and
when Fulbert found out, he was outraged. He had Abélard castrated and sent Héloïse
off to a convent where she eventually became abbess. Abélard took monastic vows at
the abbey in St-Denis and continued his studies and controversial writings.
Yet, all the while, the star-crossed lovers corresponded: he sending tender advice on
how to run the convent and she writing passionate, poetic letters to her lost lover. The
two were reunited only in death; in 1817 their remains were disinterred and brought to
Père Lachaise cemetery in the 20e, where they lie together beneath a neo-Gothic
tombstone in division 7.
Black Times: War & Death
The Hundred Years' War (1337-1453); the Black Death (1348-49), which killed over a
third of Paris' population; and the development of free, independent cities elsewhere in
Europe, brought political tension and open insurrection to Paris. In 1420 the dukes of Bur-
gundy, allied with the English, occupied the capital and two years later John Plantagenet,
duke of Bedford, was installed as regent of France for the English king, Henry VI, then an
infant. Henry was crowned king of France at Notre Dame less than 10 years later, but Paris
was almost continuously under siege from the French.
Around that time a 17-year-old peasant girl known to history as Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of
Arc) persuaded the French pretender to the throne that she'd received a divine mission from
God to expel the English from France and bring about his coronation as Charles VII. She
rallied French troops and defeated the English north of Orléans, and Charles was crowned at
Reims. But Joan of Arc failed to take Paris. In 1430 she was captured, convicted of witch-
craft and heresy by a tribunal of French ecclesiastics and burned at the stake. Charles VII re-
turned to Paris in 1436, ending over 16 years of occupation, but the English were not en-
tirely driven from French territory for another 17 years.
