But the most interesting memory associated with the Abbey is that of the first of the modernists, Abélard, whose name is linked for ever with that of his lover, Héloïse. Only the peaceful, closing years of Abélard's stormy life connect him with Burgundy; but his stay at Cluny, under the care of Pierre le Vénérable, and his last days and burial at St. Marcel, justify me, I hope, in telling again here the life stories of two whose names, with those of Aucassin and Nicolette, Petrarch and Laura, Dante and Beatrice, Paolo and Francesca, are blazoned, for all time, upon the scrolls of love. It was in the year 1105, or 1106, that a young Breton, about sixteen years of age, of good family, came to Paris to study at the schools of the Quartier Latin, on the Montagne St. Gêneviève, now occupied by the buildings of the Sorbonne. His father, the Seigneur de Pallet, near Nantes, had destined his son for the profession of arms; but a natural bent towards books and learning, and the consequent ambition to become formidable in "logic," induced the lad to abandon prospects of fortune and military glory, to play a prominent and extraordinarily romantic part in the religious and philosophical movements of the greatest century of the middle ages. The schools of philosophy of Paris were already the most famous in the world, when Abélard put himself, as he expresses it in a letter to Philintus, "under the direction of one Champeaux, a professor who had acquired the character of the most skilful philosopher of his age, but by negative excellencies only, as being the least ignorant." The boy was well received at first, but his abilities in debate and dialectics soon aroused the natural jealousy of a master, who perceived himself to be no match for his pupil. Abélard withdrew to Melun for safety, and for the better establishment of his fast-developing theories concerning the necessary compatibility of dogma and reason, summed up in the phrase "Nul ne peut croire sans avoir compris," an axiom fraught with danger in the middle ages, and in those which succeeded them. After some years of retirement, the young dialectician attended the schools of Anselm, Bishop of Laon, where, finding himself thoroughly dissatisfied with the teaching of one of whom he could only say, "Stet magni nominus umbra," he decided to take for his guides the primitive fathers, and to launch boldly, for himself, into the study of the Holy Scriptures.