Setting apart the letters of Abélard, which it is idle to question in themselves, it must be admitted that there are features in the letters of Heloise which are startling to the modern mind. These are the features on which her romantic admirers have concentrated; they will appear in due course. But when one evades the pressure of modern associations, and considers the correspondence in its twelfth-century setting, there is no inherent improbability in it. Rather the reverse. As to the publication of letters in which husband and wife had written the most sacred confidences, we need not suppose, as M. Gréard does, that Heloise ever intended such a result, or built up her notes into letters for that purpose. Nothing compels us to think that they were brought together until years after the writers had been laid in a common tomb. There are obvious interpolations, it is true, but we shall only increase the difficulty—nay, we shall create a difficulty—if we look upon the most extraordinary passages in the letters as coming from any other source than the heart of an impassioned lover. As regards what a logician would call the external difficulty—that we cannot trace the letters further back than the middle of the thirteenth century—it need not discompose us. The conditions which make a negative argument of that character valid are not present here. Abélard had been condemned and his party scattered. There are no writers to whom we should look for allusions to the letters before Guillaume de Lorris and Jehan le Meung manifestly introduce them in the _Roman de la Rose_. Indeed this circumstance, and the fact that the oldest manuscript we have dates from one hundred years after the death of Heloise, incline one to think that she wished the treasure to be preserved in a reverent privacy.