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The first time Héloise met Abelard was when he became a lodger at her uncle’s home in exchange for his services. On that first encounter, Abelard discovered that the life of the body was as vital as the life of the mind. Divesting himself of his religious vow of chastity as well as his moral code, Abelard was soon tutoring Héloise in more than Socrates. Abelard took a break from philosophy and penned love songs for Héloise. He later wrote of his earliest moments with her, “Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired, and then with our books open before us, more words of love than of reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching. My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts.” Abelard’s attraction to Héloise transcended the merely physical; it was also the meeting of minds. He said of Héloise that she was “nominatissima”—“most renowned” for her brilliance.

  The course of true love went smoothly for eighteen months, until Canon Fulbert caught the two making love on Good Friday. Fulbert was infuriated and saw the situation as a teacher taking sexual advantage of a teenager twenty years his junior. As further salt in his wound, it had been conducted covertly in his own home. A final public twist of the knife occurred when he discovered that Héloise was pregnant.

  The enraged canon demanded that the couple be immediately married to prevent family shame and public scandal. Although Abelard readily agreed, Héloise was reluctant; she had her own theology of love that did not allow her to put public censure over Abelard’s eminent post. Abelard wrote of Héloise’s altruism, “She, however, most violently disapproved of this, and for two chief reasons: the danger thereof, and the disgrace which it would bring upon me. ... What penalties, she said, would the world rightly demand of her if she should rob it of so shining a light!” Héloise wrote of her impending nuptials, “Then there is no more left but this, that in our doom the sorrow yet to come shall be no less than the love we two have already known.”

  After the clandestine wedding, the canon spread the news that his niece was married and their baby, Astrolabe (named after an astrological instrument), was therefore legitimate. However, Héloise, ever protective of her husband’s career, continued to deny her marriage. The situation became so volatile that Abelard, fearing for his new wife, placed her in a convent in Argenteuil, on the outskirts of Paris. Ironically, this act of protection led to the couple’s tragic destiny.

  Fulbert, acting under the erroneous assumption that Abelard had put Héloise in the abbey to abandon her, decided to exact a fitting revenge. When Abelard was asleep, Fulbert, with the assistance of one of Abelard’s servants who had been bought off, broke into his room. As Abelard later wrote of their violent attack, “They cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow.” The castration was, so to speak, Fulbert’s variation of “an eye for an eye.” To lesser loves this act would have served as the death knell, but Abelard and Héloise’s devotion remained constant.

  No longer able to live as Héloise’s husband, Abelard took his vows in the St. Denis monastery; similarly Héloise, in her heart still married to Abelard, stayed on at her convent and eventually became a nun. She later explained that she agreed to devote her life to religion only because it was Abelard’s will: “It was your command, not love of God, which made me take the veil.”

  Although the violent act had forced their lives asunder, Abelard never abandoned his love. When Argenteuil was taken over by the abbey where Peter had been ordained, he arranged for Héloise and her fellow nuns to enter the Oratory of the Paraclete. Héloise, by channeling the energy she had once expended on Abelard to her religious calling, rose to the position of abbess.

  For years, the couple lived their separate lives, though their thoughts were always of one another. They eventually reconnected when Peter penned a twenty-thousand-word account of his tragedy in deference to the medieval genre of the “letter of consolation,” whereby, in order to console a fellow pilgrim in pain, one wrote of his or her own sorrow, demonstrating the democracy of agony. Héloise received a copy of the confession and immediately composed a letter to her estranged husband clarifying that not even time, vows, or God had been able to extinguish the flame of her feelings. Thus began a twenty-year correspondence.

  In her letters, Héloise encouraged Abelard in his quest for knowledge and exhorted him to share with her every detail of his life, making sure not to spare any unpleasant aspects. In one she wrote, “I will finish a long letter with a brief ending: Farewell, my only love.” In turn, his missives are filled with endless pages of his steadfast feelings. Between the lines one can read the message of what could have been. Their love affair became material for troubadours and medieval minstrels and remains poignant today.

  Héloise’s reaction to the cruelty of fate was always to bemoan her cruel loss and long for the physical intimacy which had made her feel alive. Throughout her life she questioned God for permitting the horror inflicted on Abelard and for her role as a nun. The only thing she never questioned was her unwavering feelings for her lost love. She wrote to him, “I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what we have lost.” At the end, even when Héloise was wrapped in the robes of a nun, earthly romance was her true religion. Abelard, on the other hand, stricken in conscience, viewed his castration as divine retribution for his flouting of morality. He perceived their tragedy as one orchestrated by the Almighty, as the means for him to embrace the love of God over the love of the flesh. He explained his philosophy in a letter: “See then my beloved, see how with the dragnets of His mercy, the Lord has fished us up from the depths of the dangerous sea.”

  In 1142, on his way to Rome to plead a theological question, Peter fell ill and collapsed at the Abbey of Cluny, where he lingered for several months. From there he was taken to the priory of St. Marcel, where he passed from this world to the one with which he was always absorbed. His last words were, “I don’t know.”

  Héloise survived Abelard for more than twenty years, without even the comfort of his written words. Her last words were of her first love: “In death, at last, let me rest with Abelard.”

  The treatises of the scholar Abelard have been consigned to the dustbin of history; what survives is the tale of two martyrs to romance who, although they were the playthings of fate, managed to transcend physical love for an immortal one.

  Postscript

  Peter Abelard was buried in St. Marcel; however, Héloise arranged for his remains to be secretly removed to the Paraclete so they could be under her care. When she passed away, her body was placed next to his.

  Six hundred years later, the empress Josephine Bonaparte, enamored of the star-crossed lovers’ passion, arranged for their removal from their original resting place to the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, so they could be entombed together in the city where they had first kindled their romance. The crypt has become a mecca for romantics and the lovelorn, who leave notes at the burial ground.

  3

  Antony and Cleopatra

  41 BC

  The romance between the Roman general Antony and Cleopatra, his Egyptian queen, has captured the imagination of artists, poets, and playwrights since antiquity. The reason for their timeless appeal most likely lies in their last desperate acts, history’s most famous suicides—undertaken because they preferred death to life without each other.

  Controlling the land of the Nile since the reign of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemy family and their royal line of succession decreed that a brother and a sister marry and jointly share the throne. With the death of Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, power passed to his eighteen-year-old daughter Cleopatra and his twelve-year-old son Ptolemy XIII. Although the dynasty is to be commended for not favoring male heirs over female ones, the brother-sister/husband-wife rulers often engaged in more than mere sibling rivalry. Driven by a desire to be the sole ruler, Cleopatra embarked in a civil war against her brother; as a result she was driven fr
om her palace in Alexandria by an army loyal to Ptolemy.

  In the thick of the royal family feud Julius Caesar arrived from Rome in pursuit of his enemy Pompey; however, with the discovery that the Egyptians had assassinated his rival, he turned his attention to arbitrating the bloodbath that was tearing apart the land of the Nile. In one of the great iconic meetings in world history, Cleopatra, barred entry to her palace, had her servants roll her up in a Persian carpet and smuggle her into the palace, where the rug was laid at Caesar’s feet. When the seductively clad Egyptian queen tumbled out, Julius was charmed both by her gesture and her allure, so much so that they soon became intimate.

  The following morning Caesar let it be known that Cleopatra’s enemies were now his enemies. The ruler who was to proclaim “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) was himself conquered by the femme fatale with the kohl-rimmed eyes, and nine months later she bore his baby, Ptolemy Caesar, nicknamed Caesarion. Ptolemy XIII (conveniently for his sister) ended up drowned in the Nile, thanks to Julius’s machinations.

  When Caesar returned to Rome, he did so with his paramour and their son in tow. To the disgust of his wife, Calpurnia, and his people, in the Temple of Venus he erected a golden statue of Cleopatra, depicted as Isis. Although Hollywood portrayed the queen as a great beauty, coins bearing her likeness prove the contrary. Plutarch writes of her, “For her beauty was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.” In other words, she was plain. What made Cleopatra attractive were her wit, charm, and intelligence. The only claim she had to looks was a large nose, which was considered a mark of beauty in her epoch.

  In 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated on the steps of the Forum on the ides of March. His death would change the course of history as well as Cleopatra’s own life.

  After Caesar’s death, the general Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony), became, along with Octavian, one of the three leaders of Rome. Fearing an eventual power struggle with Octavian, Marc arranged for a meeting with the Egyptian queen, hoping to gain a powerful political ally. He was to gain far more.

  When Cleopatra received Antony’s summons for an interview, she vowed to seduce him in the same fashion as she had done her former Roman general. She needed the protection of the ruler of the most powerful nation in the world to safeguard her throne and secure the succession of Caesarion. She staged the entrance of the millennium.

  Cleopatra sailed down the river in a gilded barge, adorned with swelling sails of Tyrian purple. The ship was filled with such a quantity of rose petals that the Romans knew of her arrival before she appeared on their horizon. The oars were silver, drawn by servant girls clad as nymphs. The boat drew near the shore to the accompaniment of the music of flutes and harps. Against this frame, Cleopatra lay on a divan beneath a canopy of gold, dressed in the garb of Venus, fanned by boys clad as Cupid.

  The first time Cleopatra met Antony was when he came to dine on her palace barge. He was immediately enraptured by the seductress. The queen, who had most likely given herself to Caesar only for political expediency, became the paramour of Antony—but this time, it was for love. The couple spent all their time together, which led to Antony’s neglect of his legions.

  When Cleopatra returned to Alexandria, she did so with Antony, who abandoned his military campaign to follow her. According to Plutarch, Cleopatra “played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him. At night she would go rambling with him to disturb and torment people at their windows, dressed like a servant-woman, for Antony also went in servant’s disguise ... However, the Alexandrians in general liked it all well enough, and joined good-humoredly and kindly in his frolic and play.”

  Not so the Romans. They viewed her as a lustful seductress who employed sex and sorcery to seduce their two greatest generals. Marc Antony had fallen far from the magnificent orator whose eulogy for Caesar had made him the most celebrated of his countrymen.

  Finally, after a year Antony pulled himself away from Cleopatra to rejoin his legions in Rome. When he arrived, to help make amends, he agreed to wed Octavian’s sister, Octavia, though his heart lay in Egypt. The messengers who conveyed this information to Cleopatra probably did so with the greatest of trepidation, as she was known to kill those who brought disturbing news (giving birth to the expression “Don’t kill the messenger”). She was particularly unhappy with the timing of her lover’s nuptials, as she was pregnant with his twins, Alexander Helios (“The Sun”), and Cleopatra Selene (“The Moon”).

  In his own country, Antony was caught in an emotional tug-of-war, endlessly torn between his two mistresses: Rome and Cleopatra. Unable to deny the latter, he headed to Asia Minor and sent for Cleopatra to join him. There he married her under Egyptian law, which allowed polygamy, and announced the paternity of his son and daughter. As a wedding present he presented her with the Roman dominions of Syria, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Crete. She was delighted with the gifts; Octavian, however, did not share the sentiment.

  The couple began presenting themselves as divine and bedecked themselves as Osiris and Isis. Disgusted with these actions, Rome, as much as it once idolized Antony, now vilified him. Antony, by falling into Cleopatra’s arms, had placed his neck in Octavian’s hands. The latter decided to destroy Antony to advance his own means. By obliterating his enemy he would avenge his slighted sister ; moreover, he could set himself up as Augustus Caesar and become his country’s first emperor. He asked the Senate to declare war against Egypt.

  In 31 BC, Antony’s forces faced Octavian’s in a high-stakes naval battle off the coast of Actium in Greece. The victor would become the undisputed leader of the most powerful country in the world. Cleopatra, in a ship with a gold sail, anxiously awaited its outcome. At a crucial stage in the battle, Cleopatra suddenly gave a signal that signified retreat. At this point Antony had a choice: follow his heart and Cleopatra, or follow his duties as a Roman general. He immediately set off after her, proving that to him power was nothing; his queen was everything. When his legions saw that their leader had abandoned the battle, they did likewise and joined forces with Octavian. Shakespeare, in his play Antony and Cleopatra, wrote of Antony’s action, “The triple pillar of the world transform’d into a strumpet’s fool.” The legions of Rome marched to Alexandria.

  During the ensuing land battle, Cleopatra took refuge in a mausoleum. When Antony heard this news, he assumed his queen was dead. He had made his love the world; without her, there was nothing. No longer willing to go on, in the Roman fashion of suicide, he fell on his own sword. As he lay dying, he was informed that she was merely in hiding. His last order as a general was for his soldiers to carry him to Cleopatra; he died in her arms. The Queen of the Nile had but one course of action: to show how a descendant of kings could die. Ten years earlier she had made a grand entrance to meet Antony; now it was the occasion to make a grand departure.

  She wrote a letter for Octavian, with a plea that she be buried alongside Antony. Cleopatra also ordered her servants to bring her a basket of figs, inside which was concealed a poisonous asp. Dressed in full royal regalia, replete with the pharaoh’s Uraeus headdress, she put the cobra to her breast. She then lay down on a couch of gold to join her ancestors, to join Antony.

  Antony and Cleopatra flung away the two greatest empires of the world and committed suicide for one another, ensuring that their tale would pass from an individual story to an iconic one.

  Postscript

  Plutarch wrote that Cleopatra was found dead, with her handmaiden Iras dying at her feet while another handmaiden, Charmion, was discovered adjusting her queen’s crown before she too succumbed to poison. Octavian honored the couple’s last wish, interring them together in one tomb in Alexandria.

  Egypt’s top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, who sports an Indiana Jones hat, believes that a temple located thirty miles from Alexandria contains the tomb of the doomed lovers.

  4

  Prince Khurram and Mumtaz Mahal

  1607

 
The man who was renowned as king of the world achieved immortality not through empire, but rather through the monument he erected as an immortal tribute to the woman he loved.

  The eastern fairy tale began in India with the birth of Prince Khurram Shihab-ud-din-Muhammad, the third and favorite son of Emperor Jahangir and his second wife. The name Khurram, Persian for “joyful,” was bestowed by his grandfather. As a youth he distinguished himself in martial arts, as a military commander, and in architecture. His destiny, Arjumand Banu Begum, was born in Agra, in what was then the Mogul Empire, which stretched from Russia to China and included modern India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

  The first time Khurram met Arjumand was when the fifteen-year-old prince was strolling in the Meena Bazaar, the private market attached to the harem. Every female at the marketplace held a torch for the handsome, fabulously wealthy son of Emperor Jahangir. However, it wasn’t until he passed an exquisitely beautiful girl whose stall was filled with silk and glass beads that his attention was caught. Khurram asked the girl the price of the largest of the trinkets, and, in the age-old language of flirtation, she replied it was a precious diamond, one he could not afford. He paid her the fantastic sum of ten thousand rupees and left carrying the glass bead, as well as the heart of the girl—Arjumand.

  That evening he asked his father’s permission to marry Arjumand, the daughter of the prime minister, and the emperor raised his right hand in assent, as his son was his favorite, and as he too was in awe of Arjumand’s dazzling allure. However, the emperor declared that the marriage could not take place for five years, and that his son could not see his intended for that period and would have to first marry another wife, a Persian princess, for political reasons. The emperor’s word was law, and the prince was obliged to wed two times and to carry out his conjugal duties with each one; his unions produced two children.