[1] I am thinking, of course, of the thousands of simple folk who rushed blindfold into the fatal procession towards Jerusalem, setting their children on their rude carts, and asking naïvely, at each tower that came in sight in their own France, if that was the Holy City: those whose bones marked the path to Palestine for later Crusaders. As to the professional warriors, there is surely more humour than aught else in the picture of the King of France and his like setting forth to ‘do penance’ for their vice and violence by a few months of adventure, carnage, and pillage. That life begins some day in the last decade of the eleventh century, when the young Breton, then in his fifteenth or sixteenth year, went out from his father’s castle into the bright world on the quest of Minerva. Of his earlier years we know nothing. Later fancy has brooded over them to some purpose, it is true, if there are any whom such things interest. The usual unusual events were observed before and after his birth, and the immortal swarm of bees that has come down the ages, kissing the infant lips of poets and philosophers, did not fail to appear at Pallet. In point of sober fact, we rely almost exclusively on Abélard’s autobiography for the details of his earlier career, and he tells us nothing of his childhood, and not much of his youth. It matters little. The life of a soul begins when it looks beyond the thoughts of parents and teachers—if it ever do—out into the defiant world, and frames a view and a purpose. The home from which Abélard issued, somewhere about the year 1095, was an ancient castle at Pallet, in Brittany, about eleven miles to the south-east of Nantes. At the end of the village, which was threaded on the high road from Nantes to Poitiers, a steep eminence dominated the narrow flood of the Sanguèze. The castle was built on this: overlooking the village more, as it chanced, in a spirit of friendly care than of haughty menace. The spot is still visited by many a pilgrim—not with a priestly benediction; but the castle is now the mere relic of a ruin. In the most penetrating movements of his prophetic genius, Abélard never foresaw the revolt of the serfs, or indeed any economic development. In this one respect he failed to detect and outstrip what little advance was made in his day. His father’s castle has disappeared with the age it belonged to, and the sons of his vassals now lay the bones of their dead to rest on his desolated hearth.