The very locality proved an affliction. He had exchanged the gentle beauty and the mild climate of the valley of the Seine for a wild, bleak, storm-swept sea-shore. The abbey was built on a small promontory that ran out into the Bay of Biscay, a few leagues to the south of Vannes. It was perched on the edge of the steep granite cliffs, and Abélard’s very pen seems to shudder as he writes of the constant roar of the waves at the foot of the rocks and the sweep of the ocean winds. Behind them stretched a long series of sand-hills. They occupied a scarcely gracious interval between desolation and desolation. For Abélard was not of the temperament to appreciate the grandeur of an ever-restless ocean or to assimilate the strength that is borne on its winds. He was sadly troubled. Here he had fled, he says, to the very end of the earth, the storm-tossed ocean barring his further retreat, yet he finds the world no less repulsive and cruel. In the character of abbot, Abélard was at liberty to seek what consolation he could outside his abbey. He soon found that there was none to be had in the vicinity of Rhuys. ‘The whole barbarous population of the land was similarly lawless and undisciplined,’ he says; that seems to include such other monks and priests as the locality contained. Even their language was unintelligible to him, he complains; for, although he was a Breton, his ear would only be accustomed to Latin and to Romance French, which would differ considerably from the Celtic Bas-Breton. Whether the lord of the district was equally wild—as seems most probable—or no, the way to his château was barred by another difficulty. He was considered the bitter enemy of the abbey, for he had ‘annexed’ the lands that belonged by right to the monks. Moreover he exacted a heavy tribute from them. They were frequently without food, and wandered about stealing all they could lay their hands on for the support of their wives and families. They violently urged Abélard to fight for their rights and find food for them, instead of giving them his ethereal discourses. And the abbot succeeded just far enough to embitter the usurper against him, without obtaining much for his lawless monks. He found himself in a new dilemma. If he remained in the abbey he was assailed all day by the hungry clamour and the brutal violence of his ‘subjects’; if he went abroad the tyrannical lord threatened to have him done to death by his armed retainers. For three or four years Abélard sustained this miserable existence almost without alleviation. In 1129, however, an event occurred which, evil as it looked at the moment, proved a source of considerable happiness to him for some years.