Héloïse and Abélard at Père Lachaise

What happened in the twelfth century

Peter Abelard was the most formidable logician in Europe and, by his own account in the Historia calamitatum, an insufferable one. Around 1115 he was engaged to tutor Héloïse, the exceptionally learned niece of a canon of Notre-Dame. They began an affair, she bore a son, and they married in secret.

Her uncle's family took revenge by having Abelard castrated. Both entered religious life — he as a monk, she eventually as prioress and then abbess of the Paraclete, the community he had founded. The letters they exchanged afterwards, which survive, are still the most uncomfortable and most intelligent correspondence about desire and renunciation in medieval literature. Héloïse gives no ground. She tells him, repeatedly, that she would rather have been his mistress than an empress, and she does not apologise for it.

He died in 1142 and she in 1164. She was buried with him at the Paraclete, near Nogent-sur-Seine.

How they got to Paris

The Revolution closed the Paraclete and sold it. The remains — whatever remained, after several earlier moves and reburials within the abbey — were brought to Paris in 1800 by Alexandre Lenoir, the archaeologist who ran the Musée des monuments français, a state depot for the medieval sculpture the Revolution had stripped from churches.

Lenoir did not find an intact tomb, so he built one. He assembled a canopy from Gothic stonework salvaged from the Paraclete and other suppressed abbeys, and set recumbent effigies beneath it. It is, in the strict sense, a nineteenth-century construction using twelfth- and thirteenth-century parts — one of the earliest pieces of romantic medievalism in France, made a generation before anyone had coined the term.

In 1817 it was moved to Père Lachaise, where the administration was busy assembling a cast of famous dead.

Who is actually under it

Unclear. The bones went through at least three moves before Lenoir got to them, in a period with no archaeological standards, and the labelling at every stage was traditional rather than evidential. There is a persistent side-story — that the couple were long buried separately and only later reunited — which surfaces in nineteenth-century accounts and cannot be checked either.

The monument does not depend on it. What is under the canopy is at most a set of medieval remains from the right abbey; what is on it is nine centuries of people deciding that this story mattered enough to keep moving the stones.

What to look for, and the letters left behind

Look at the joins. Because Lenoir assembled the canopy from parts, the mouldings do not always run through, and once you see it you cannot unsee it: this is a collage, and a very skilful one.

Look also at the base, where people leave letters. The tradition — that leaving a note here will help an unhappy love — is a nineteenth-century invention, contemporary with the monument itself, and the cemetery clears the notes periodically. It is the oldest continuous act of visitor participation at Père Lachaise, older than the kisses on Wilde's tomb by about a hundred and fifty years.

Division 7 is a short, mostly level walk from the main gate, which makes this one of the easiest famous monuments to reach for anyone who is not going to manage the hill. Camille Pissarro is in the same division, and Jim Morrison is a couple of minutes below in division 6.