Peter the Venerable continued to correspond with Heloise and visited the Paraclete on at least one occasion, probably when he brought Abelard’s body for reburial. Heloise wrote to him in thanks and reminded him that he had agreed to send a document of absolution to be placed over Abelard’s tomb, which he did. He also wrote an epitaph, praising Abelard as “our Aristotle, prince of scholars.” Peter also offered to find a prebend in a great church for “your Astralabe,” presumably the son of Heloise and Abelard, who would have been in his twenties. There is no definitive record of what became of Astralabe, although there are tantalizing but inconclusive clues as to what may have been his fate. The name was uncommon, and so any mention of an Astralabe stands out in the records. Astralabe was the name of a cathedral canon at Nantes in 1150, and of an abbot at the Cistercian monastery of Hauterive in Fribourg from 1162 to 1165, where the necrology lists “Peter Astralabe son of our Master Peter,” although it is not possible to know irrefutably whether these mentions refer to the son of Heloise and Abelard.
Peter the Venerable never read the eight letters exchanged between Heloise and Abelard, and he assumed that she had set aside her desire for the physical love of her husband in favor of her new life as a nun. Had he read their letters, he would have realized that Heloise had not surrendered her yearning for physical closeness and refrained from writing about it only out of obedience to Abelard. She acknowledged in her second letter to Abelard that her inner life, her soul, in which her intention dwelled, had not embraced the religious life, and so before God she deserved no praise. Heloise lived another 22 years after Abelard’s death, until about 1164. During this final third of her life, she further demonstrated her considerable abilities as the abbess of the Paraclete. When she died, the convent had given life to six daughter houses and owned considerable properties in the valley of the Ardusson, the small stream on which the Paraclete was situated. In all, Abelard had provided the nuns with a rule that established a uniform liturgy between Paraclete and her daughter houses, a hymnal (Heloise had complained to Abelard that there were no hymns to honor women who were neither virgins nor saints), and a series of six planctus, or laments on biblical themes.
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