In a few months the famed philosopher appeared in a new character, as ‘the first of the troubadours,’ to use the words of Ampère. ‘À mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit les passions sont plus grandes,’ said Pascal. Of all false epigrams that is surely the falsest, but it would be easily inspired by the transformation of Pierre Abélard. The sober-living man of forty, whom all had thought either never to have known or long since to have passed the fever of youth, was mastered by a deep, tyrannical passion. The problems of dialectics were forgotten, the alluring difficulties of Ezechiel unheeded. Day after day the murmuring throng was dismissed untaught from the cloistral school; whilst passers-by heard songs that were ardent with deep love from the windows of the canon’s house. All Paris, even all France, caught the echo, says Heloise, and ‘every street, every house, resounded with my name.’ The strange ‘Story of love and learning,’ as an old ballad expressed it, was borne through the kingdom in Abélard’s own impassioned words.[16] [16] Not a single one of Abélard’s songs has come down to us. A few songs are to be found which bear his name, but they are not genuine. It is an unfortunate loss, since the religious hymns of his later years convey no better impression of his true and unspoiled poetic faculty than the moonlight does of the rays of the sun. Months ran on, and the purblind priest remained wholly unconscious of what all Paris sang nightly in its taverns. At length the truth was forced upon his mind, and he at once interrupted the love-story. He drove Abélard from the house, and raised the usual futile barriers to the torrent of passion. Whether the canon was really more earnest than the majority of his order, and therefore sincerely shocked at the thought of the liaison, or whether it had disturbed some other project he had formed, it is impossible to say. Heloise herself, in her sober maturity, affirms that any woman in France would have thought her position more honourable than any marriage. However that may be, Fulbert angrily forbade a continuance of the relation. Once more Abélard must have felt the true alternative that honour placed before him: either to crush his passion and return to the school, or to marry Heloise and sacrifice the desire of further advancement in ecclesiastical dignity.