But what an effort must it have cost the woman, not yet in her thirtieth year, and with her beauty still in bloom, to accept her position, to respect his; to honour as her spiritual brother only, him who was her lover and her husband. Yet she did it--though with awful searchings of heart, with longings, and inward rebellion against fate, that her letters have, in measure, revealed. Happily for her, the torturing joy of their last meetings was not for long. Already rumours and scandal were busy with their names. Abélard came one day to Paraclet; then he came no more. The lovers were not to meet again in this world. Only letters would pass between them--letters that reveal in a wonderful light the passive strength of her character, the utter surrender of herself, body, soul, and spirit, to the man who had won her love. As literature, they reveal the fact that Héloïse, had she given her life to such work, could have excelled all the men of her time[122] in the domain of letters. As human documents, their correspondence remains "A dream, an idyll, call it what you will, Of man still man, and woman--woman still." The man remained the man, in that, true to his new relationship to her, with the passing of the years he became less the lover and more the priest; he conquered, or he cooled. The woman, true to her type, renounced; but she, though she, too, attained a measure of spiritual liberty, never repented, and I think that she never really changed. The last episodes in the stormy life of Abélard are soon told. On his final return from Paraclet, he found the monks risen in active revolt against him. Attempts were made, even, to poison him in the holy cup; and he hardly escaped the assassin's knife. In this extremity his thoughts turned again to the scene of those early successes in the Montagne St. Gêneviève, and Paris saw and heard him for the last time. Years that had bowed his head, had not changed the bent of his mind. The innovator was the innovator still. To Bernard, busily engaged in reforming his order in the lonely Vallée d'Absinthe, came the news that Abélard, whom he thought a spent force, had broken out once more. The fanatic was furious. "On fermera cette bouche avec des bâtons," he said, and girded up his loins "to fight the dragon." From his renewed triumphs among the scholars of the Latin quarter, Abélard was summoned to the last great public scene of his life, the Council of Sens.