"God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours. The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend [amica], or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore......you kept silent about most of my arguments for preferring love to wedlock and freedom to chains. God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore."
This letter was written some time after 1132 C.E. in France. Heloise is amazingly modern in her attitude to love.
I used the Penguin Classic "The Letters of Abelard and Heloise" , Betty Radice trans. I highly recommend it as it has everything you want to know about these two. It includes a history of their romance, other writings, a couple of letters between Peter the Venerable and Heloise, a brief history of France at the time that they were living, current scholarship on the letters, etc..
