“These letters,” says he, “are evidently very laboured. The circumstances follow each other with great regularity, and the vehement emotions that are traceable throughout, do not in any wise interfere with the methodical march of the whole. The length of the letters, and the learned quotations in them from the Bible, from the fathers of the church, and from pagan authors, all seem to indicate that they were composed with a purpose and with art, and were by no means the production of a hasty pen. Eloisa, we must remember, was a woman of letters, and a reputation for learning was of great value in her eyes. Did she, who survived her lover upwards of twenty years, wish to bequeath to posterity the memory of their misfortunes, by herself arranging and digesting at a later period, so as to form a literary composition, the letters that at divers times she had written and received? Or has perhaps a more eloquent and experienced pen undertaken the task? These are questions difficult to resolve. Anyhow, the oldest manuscript of this correspondence with which we are acquainted, is upwards of a hundred years posterior to the death of Eloisa. It is, as we have already said, the manuscript of the library of the town of Troyes.” Let us now proceed to examine the authority for the so-called tomb of these lovers in the cemetery of Père la Chaise. Two learned archæologists will enlighten us on the subject. Monsieur Lenoir,[27] in his _Musée des Monuments français_, and Monsieur de Guilhermy, in an article of the _Annales Archéologiques de Didron_ for 1846. During the French Revolution of 1792, the convent of the Paraclete, founded by Abelard, was sold. In order to protect the remains of the lovers from desecration, which was too common in those days, some worthy inhabitants of Nogent-sur-Seine, took possession of the coffins and deposited them in the church of that town. Seven years later M. Lenoir obtained the permission of the minister to transfer these remains to Paris, and it occurred to him at the same time, that it would be expedient to enclose them in a tomb of the period in which the lovers had lived. He was told that in the chapel of the infirmary of Saint Marcel-les-Chalons, Peter the Venerable had erected a monument to Abelard. Several denied this fact; but be that as it may, Monsieur Lenoir obtained possession of part of this monument, which had been purchased by a physician of the town in order to save it from destruction. M. Lenoir then constructed a monument with the fragments of a chapel of the abbey of St. Denis, and, as he tells us, placed the sarcophagus, which was of the style of architecture in vogue in the 12th century, in a room of the museum entrusted to his care. The following information given by M. de Guilhermy[28] will show us how far M. Lenoir succeeded in his architectural device, and how far the sarcophagus contains the actual remains of Abelard and Eloisa: