The dominant feeling aroused by such a humiliation, in the mind of a man so proud as Abélard, was, naturally, that of shame; penitence took but a second place. He felt that he could face the world no longer; yet jealousy told him that he could not take the cowl, while another took Héloïse, and knew delights, spiritual and carnal, that had once been his. Héloïse, living only in and for her earthly husband, could refuse him nothing at such a crisis. She took the veil at Argenteuil, and became, for her lover's sake, the spouse of Christ. Abélard donned the robe of the Benedictines at the great abbey of St. Denis, in 1119. If he had expected to regain peace and serenity in such a house, he must have been grievously disappointed. The abbey of St. Denis had not escaped the degeneracy that had already overtaken many of the monastic institutions of the day. It had become a centre of private and political intrigue, a pleasure resort for the fashionable life of Paris; laughter and the rustle of ladies' robes were heard in the long alleys of the cloister.[119] Against these abuses the new-comer was not slow to raise his eloquent voice. It was not heeded, or was received only with jeers. Abélard withdrew, by permission, to the monastery of Deuil, close by, where he opened a school, and gave himself up again to teaching, and to propagating the advanced theology that had already scandalized the more orthodox of Paris. His treatise on "The Divine Trinity and Unity," brought him before the Council of Soissons. The persecution of the freethinker had begun; and though the daring innovator endeavoured strenuously to justify his writings, the fathers condemned him to throw, with his own hands, his book into the lighted brazier prepared in the midst of the assembly. He was then handed over, for correction, to the care of the abbot of St. Médard de Soissons. This sentence was soon annulled, and Abélard found himself once more at St. Denis. But not for long. Sleeping enmities were aroused; and, one night, Abélard, with the connivance of certain monks, fled secretly from the abbey, and took refuge near Nogent, in a remote part of Champagne, where he hoped "to avoid fame" and live secure against the malice of his enemies. But to avoid fame was not in the reformer's destiny. The hermit was soon surrounded by his followers, who converted a natural grotto into a chapel, and built themselves rustic huts of boughs and thatch, in this Paraclet,[120] the place of their master's consolation.