‘At length, when the dinner was over, Peter’s work was brought in, and some one was directed to read it aloud. This fellow, animated with a hatred of Peter, and well watered with the juice of the grape, read in a much louder voice than he had been asked to do. After a time you would have seen them knock their feet together, laugh, and crack jokes; you would think they were honouring Bacchus rather than Christ. And all the time the cups are going, the wine is being praised, the episcopal throats are being moistened. The juice of the lethal drink had already buried their hearts.... Then, when anything unusually subtle and divine was read out, anything the episcopal ears were not accustomed to, they hardened their hearts and ground their teeth against Peter. “Shall we let this monster live?” they cried.... The heat of the wine at length relaxed the eyes of all in slumber. The reader continues amidst their snoring. One leans on his elbow in order to sleep. Another gets a soft cushion. Another slumbers with his head resting on his knees. So when the reader came to anything particularly thorny in Peter, he shouted in the deaf ears of the pontiffs: “Do you condemn?” And some of them just waking up at the last syllable, would mutter: “We condemn.”’ It is not difficult to take off the due and considerable discount from the youthful extravagance of Master Bérenger. Bernard’s followers (in the _Histoire littéraire de la France_) say he had ‘too noble a soul and too elevated a sentiment to stoop to the refutation of such a work.’ He has never, at all events, essayed to rebut the charge of procuring a verdict against Abélard on the day before the synod. Even in our own days it is a familiar source of merriment in ecclesiastical and monastic circles to see a group of prelates fervently following the red Mass of the Holy Ghost as a preliminary to a discussion of points which they have notoriously settled over their cups the night before. Such a meeting of the bishops on the Sunday would be inevitable. Bernard would inevitably be present, and Abélard infallibly excluded. In any case, the evidence is too precise and substantial to be rejected. Indeed, the story fully harmonises with our knowledge of Bernard’s earlier and subsequent conduct. It is not ours to inquire minutely how far Bernard was consistent with himself and his lofty ideals in acting thus.