Memoirs of Celebrated Characters Author:Alphonse de Lamartine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: H E L 0 I S E. A.D. 1070. Tins history has been assigned to verse; nevertheless, we do not fear to include it in a volume intended to reflect the grandest ... more »emotions of thought and feeling which have operated on the destinies of nations. Love is one of the leading influences of our nature, and when this sentiment is elevated by female devotion; when it is irradiated by beauty, excused by weakness, expiated by misfortune, transformed by repentance, sanctified by religion, rendered popular through a long epoch by genius, perpetuated by constancy on earth, and aspirations of immortality hereafter—this passion almost resolves itself into virtue, and raises to the level of heroic saints, two lovers, whose adventures became the theme, and their tears the sorrows of an age. Such is the story, or rather the poem, of Heloise and Abelard. During eight centuries no other has so profoundly touched the human heart. Whatever moves men long and deeply, forms a portion of their history; for human nature is equally compounded of mind and feeling. All that softens, improves. Admiration and pity affect the heart, and the heart is the safest and strongest ovgan of virtue. These two lives comprise a single one;they are so interwoven, that each existence is a perpetual rebound of the other; the same event, the same sensation, reflected back again in a double echo, produces the same undivided interest. Let us now commence our narration. Peter Abelard was the son of a knight of Brittany, named Beranger, whose family had long possessed in the neighbourhood of Nantes, the castle and village of Palais. Beranger exercised, like all the gentlemen of his day, the noble trade of war. His son was brought up to arms; but the piety of his race, attested by the religious habit which Beranger, his wife and da...« less