A more interesting appendix to the correspondence is found in the forty-two ‘Problems of Heloise,’ with the replies of Abélard. Under the pretext of following out his direction, but probably with a greater anxiety to prolong the intercourse, Heloise sent to him a list of difficulties she had encountered in reading Scripture. The daughters of Charlemagne had responded to Alcuin’s exhortations with a similar list. The little treatise is not unworthy of analysis from the historico-theological point of view, but such a task cannot be undertaken here. The problems are, on the whole, those which have presented themselves to every thoughtful man and woman who has approached the Bible with the strictly orthodox view; the answers are, generally speaking, the theological artifices which served that purpose down to the middle of the wayward nineteenth century. With this mild outbreak of rationalism Heloise passes out of the pages of history, save for a brief reintroduction in Abélard’s closing year. The interest and the force of her personality have been undoubtedly exaggerated by some of the chief biographers of Abélard, but she was assuredly an able, remarkable, and singularly graceful and interesting woman. Cousin once suddenly asked in the middle of a discourse: ‘Who is the woman whose love it would have been sweetest to have shared?’ Many names were suggested, though there must have been a strong anticipation that he would name Mme. de Longueville, for he laboured at that very time under his posthumous infatuation for the sister of Condé. But he answered, Heloise, ‘that noble creature who loved like a St. Theresa, wrote sometimes like Seneca, and who must have been irresistibly charming, since she charmed St. Bernard himself.’ It was a fine phrase to deliver impromptu, but an uncritical estimate. It is a characteristic paradox to say that she loved like a St. Theresa, and an exaggeration to say that she ever wrote like Seneca. As to her charming St. Bernard—the ‘pseudo-apostle,’ as she ungraciously calls him,—they who read the one brief letter he wrote her will have a new idea of a charmed man. Yet with her remarkable ability, her forceful and exalted character in the most devitalising circumstances, and her self-realisation, she would probably have written her name in the annals of France without the assistance of Abélard. It must be remembered that she had a very singular reputation, for her age, before she met Abélard. She might have been a St. Theresa to Peter of Cluny, or, as is more probable, a Montmorency in the political chronicle of France. CHAPTER XII A RETURN TO THE ARENA