The asserted corruption of the nunnery is quite in accord with what we know of the period from other sources. We have already quoted Jacques de Vitry’s observation that none of the convents of the time, except those of the Cistercians (his own order), were fit places for an honest woman; and he describes the ‘thousand tricks and wicked artifices’ by which respectable dames were sometimes induced to enter them. The same Vandyke-like painter of the morals of the twelfth century elsewhere passes a comprehensive sentence on the convents of canonesses. Nor was this the first Parisian nunnery to be suppressed in the twelfth century. There was until 1107 a convent of Benedictine nuns on the island, on the site of the present Rue Calende. It was close to the royal palace; and the relations of the nuns to the nobles of the court had become so notorious that Bishop Galo had to intervene and put the good sisters on the street. One has only to read Abélard’s sermon on ‘Susannah’ (delivered to an exemplary community of nuns) to realise the condition of the average nunnery at that time. Heloise was prioress of the convent of Argenteuil. This is, indeed, the only circumstance that need make us hesitate to accept Suger’s words at their literal value. The Heloise of those writers who have but touched the love-romance of the famous couple, without entering into a deeper study of their characters, is pitifully inadequate. She had all the passion that poetic or decadent admirer has ever given her; she had that freer, because narrower, view of the love-relation, which only regarded her own particular and exceptional case, and did not extend to the thousand cases on which the broad law of matrimony is based; and she retained her ardent love and her particularist view throughout long years of conventual life. We may examine this more directly in the next chapter. For the moment it reveals, when it is taken in conjunction with that integrity and altitude of life which none can hesitate to assign her, a strength and elevation of character which are frequently obscured by the mere admirers of her passion. We know nothing whatever of the eight or nine miserable years of her life at Argenteuil; but as soon as she does emerge into the light of history (in 1130) she is found to be of an elevated and commanding character. She was prior, not abbess, at Argenteuil. When she became abbess, her community became a centre of light in France. Still, Heloise shared the fate of her sisters, if she had not shared their sin; in fact, we may see a protest against their life in her refusal to follow them to a new home. Suger had been directed to find a nunnery which would receive the evicted sisters, and most of them had gone to St. Mary of Footel. Heloise had not accompanied them, and she was still without a canonical home in 1129, when the news of these events reached the distant abbey of St. Gildas.