Good Bishop Hoël, in famine time, sold the gold and silver plate of his cathedral to feed the poor, and on his deathbed distributed his possessions among them. After a visit to Rome, he accompanied Urban II back to France, on the momentous occasion of the launching of the First Crusade. When the Council of Clermont ended, the pope came to Le Mans, in February of 1096, to visit his friend the bishop, to the intense pride of all the city. Such episodes reflect clearly the unison of aspiration which was presently to express itself in mighty movements. The Greek princess who saw the first crusaders arrive in Constantinople has told in graphic phrases how Europe, unloosed from its foundations, hurled itself on Asia, and with a like impetuosity western Christendom was about to fling itself toward heaven in cathedrals. The church on which Bishop Hoël had worked was destroyed in large part by fire, and his successor, the illustrious Hildebert de Lavardin (1097-1125), began a reconstruction about 1110. Hildebert was the most popular poet of his day and in the mediæval schools his letters were committed to memory. A lover of the Latin authors, he composed verses of such facture that some of them have been mistaken for ancient classics. He was philosopher, orator, and architect as well. The best years of his life were passed in Le Mans, though he was to die in Tours as archbishop of that city. While a teacher in Le Mans' cathedral school, he accompanied Bishop Hoël on his travels, and knew well Cluny and its great abbot Hugues, whose biographer he became. Hildebert possessed _esprit_, a sound judgment, and much independence. Life tested him harshly. The ordeal of prison he suffered several times, and the worse ordeal of calumny, which is disproved by the affectionate friendship felt for him by St. Anselm, St. Bernard, and Bishop Ives of Chartres. No man, he himself said in one of his sermons, should be a bishop whose life has not always been irreproachable. His contemporaries called him "a prelate attentive to the distribution of the bread of the word of God," a man zealous for discipline, charitable to the poor, and with a love for the House of Prayer that made him a builder both at Le Mans and Tours. [Illustration: _Le Mans' Choir_ (_1217-1254_). _The Double Aisles_] Like St. Anselm, he was bullied by William Rufus. Maine lay between Anjou and Normandy and was fought for by each of those expanding powers, a duel settled only by the marriage of the heiress of Maine to the heir of Anjou, the son of which union was Geoffrey the Handsome, the first Plantagenet so called, who married the heiress of Normandy and England. Geoffrey's son, Henry II of England, inherited Maine, Anjou, and Normandy before he fell heir to the kingdom across the Channel.