Abélard himself seems to have taken matters with a fatal coolness, whilst his adversary was moving heaven and earth to destroy him. He allowed a month or two to elapse before he turned in the direction of Rome.[36] Secure in the consciousness of the integrity of his cause and his own power of pleading, and presuming too much of Rome’s proud boast that it ‘condemned no man unheard,’ he saw no occasion for hurry. Late in the summer he set out upon his long journey. It was his purpose to travel through Burgundy and Lyons, and to cross the Alps by the pass which was soon to bear the name of his energetic enemy. After the fashion of all travellers of the time he rested at night in the monastery nearest to the spot where he was overtaken. Thus it came to pass that, when he arrived in the neighbourhood of Mâcon, he sought hospitality of the great and venerable Benedictine abbey at Cluny. [36] He did, however, write an ‘apology’ or defence, but only a few fragments of it survive. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, was the second monk in France at that time. A few degrees lower in the scale of neural intensity than his canonised rival, he far surpassed him in the less exalted virtues of kindliness, humanity, and moderation. ‘The rule of St. Benedict,’ he once wrote to Bernard, ‘is dependent on the sublime general law of charity’; that was not the route to the honour of canonisation. He belonged by birth to the illustrious family of the Montboissiers of Auvergne, and was a man of culture, fine and equable temper, high principle, gentle and humane feeling, and much practical wisdom. He had had more than one controversy with the abbot of Clairvaux, and his influence was understood to counterbalance that of Bernard at times in the affairs of the Church and the kingdom.