But we have a clear indication that there was no change in his thoughts, even in that last year, with regard to the great work of his life and the temper of his opponents. During the quiet months of teaching at Cluny, a certain ‘Dagobert and his nephew’ asked him for a copy of his dialectical treatise, one of his earliest writings. It is impossible to say whether this Dagobert was his brother at Nantes (where Astrolabe also seems to have lived) or a monastic ‘Brother Dagobert.’ Most probably it was the former, because he speaks of the effort it costs him, ill and weary of writing as he is, to respond to their ‘affection.’ He does not copy, but rewrites his dialectics, so that we have in the work his last attitude on his studies and his struggles. It is entirely unchanged. Jealousy, hatred, and ignorance are the sole sources of the hostility to his work. They say he should have confined himself to dialectics (as Otto von Freising said later); but he points out that his enemies quarrelled even with his exclusive attention to dialectics, firstly because it had no direct relation to faith, and secondly because it was indirectly destructive of faith. He has still the old enthusiasm for reason and for the deepening and widening of our natural knowledge. Both knowledge and faith come from God, and cannot contradict each other. It was the last gleam of the dying light, but it was wholly unchanged in its purity. With the approach of spring the abbot sent the doomed man to a more friendly and familiar climate. Cluny had a priory outside the town of Chalon-sur-Saône, not far from the bank of the river. It was one of the most pleasant situations in Burgundy, in the mild valley of the Seine, which Abélard had learned to love. But the last struggle had exhausted his strength, and the disease, variously described as a fever and a disease of the skin, met with little resistance. He died on the 21st of April 1142, in the sixty-third year of his age. How deeply he had impressed the monks of St. Marcellus during his brief stay with them becomes apparent in the later history, which recalls the last chapter in the lives of some of the most popular saints. It will be remembered that Abélard had, in one of his letters to Heloise, asked that his body might be buried at the Paraclete, ‘for he knew no place that was safer or more salutary for a sorrowing soul.’ Heloise informed the abbot of Cluny of the request, and he promised to see it fulfilled. But he found that the monks of St. Marcellus were violently opposed to the idea of robbing them of the poor body that had been hunted from end to end of France whilst the great mind yet dwelt in it. There have often been such quarrels, sometimes leading to bloodshed, over the bodies of the saints. However, the abbot found a means to steal the body from the monastery chapel in the month of November, and had it conveyed secretly, under his personal conduct, to the Paraclete.