“Analyze the great love story of that era and you find rather a tragedy of tyranny. It runs thus: About the close of the Dark Ages the parents of Pierre Abelard decided, for the future repose of their souls, to repress all their natural desires and shift all mundane duties. Accordingly they retired to separate convents, leaving their son free to follow his natural bent. Argument being his ruling passion, he wandered through France challenging the local theologians in debate, always drawing a following, always making powerful enemies, and, doubtless, very much enjoying the life. At Laon he tackled the great Anselm, and finding him a man ‘of mean genius and great fluency of words without sense,’ Abelard conceived the idea of reading the Bible for himself. Then he made his way to Paris to break a lance with the great Canon Fulbert, where he met the Canon’s niece, Heloise. A love story ensued, like other love stories in many ways, except that Heloise, against all self-interest, physical, social, spiritual, refused to marry her lover, entreat as he might; she would do anything else for him, except state her true reason—but yet a woman. We have it finally in her correspondence, ‘What an injury shall I do the Church if I rob it of such a man!’ “Is it a sacrifice on the altar of the Church on her part, or is it a woman’s sacrifice for the interests of the man she loves better than herself? Had her mother made a like renunciation? No mother appears in the story of this adopted niece of an ecclesiastic. Here is Heloise’s position. In her time the only opening for a clever man was the Church with its conditions; a loving woman should not hamper an ambitious man; she should remember she cannot be to him what he is to her, which is a law of life known to woman, that we find holds true here. Having first given her all to the Church, she enters a convent at Abelard’s suggestion. But in the twelfth century, or any other, the hope of youth dies hard. Heloise does not take the black veil. She cannot burn her ships. “Thereafter this truly fair woman of Romance figures as a stern disciplinarian reporting the weaker sisters. But she is severe upon herself as well, and confesses having unlawfully opened a letter in which she was sure there was news of her Abelard; though, when in after years Abelard wished to correspond with her, she begged him not. This is the tragedy of Heloise. “Abelard also entered a convent, but there, as elsewhere, he had a wonderful faculty for carrying his point, and probably led, on the whole, a very congenial life. However, he once overstepped himself, and was summoned to appear before the Council of Soissons and commanded to burn his own book with his own hands. He ungallantly admitted that this was the saddest moment of his life. Here is Abelard’s tragedy. He felt that all was lost. But it was Abelard that the world needed, not his book.