As Abélard lay on the bed of sickness, the conversion gradually worked onwards towards a critical decision. It is not clear that the mutilation would prove of itself an impediment to scholastic honour or ecclesiastical office, but the old life could not be faced again by one with so little strength and so keen a sensibility. ‘I pondered on the glory I had won and on the swift chance blow that had obscured it, nay, wholly extinguished it: on the just judgment of God by which I had been punished in the member that had sinned: on the justice of treachery coming from him whom I had myself betrayed: on the joy of my rivals at such a humiliation: on the endless sorrow this wound would inflict on my family and my friends: on the speed with which this deep disgrace would travel through the world. What path was open to me now? How could I ever walk abroad again, to be pointed at by every finger, ridiculed by every tongue, a monstrous spectacle to all?... In such sorry plight as I was, the confusion of shame rather than a devout conversion impelled me to seek refuge in the monastery.’ To this natural ‘confusion of shame’ we must look for an explanation of, not merely the folly, but the cruelty and selfishness, of Abélard’s proposal. It involved the burial of Heloise in a nunnery. No one could shrink more feelingly from the unnatural shade of the cloister than did Heloise, as Abélard must have known, but in his pain and despair he forgot the elementary dictates of love or of honour. In any other circumstances the act would be deemed brutal. Indeed, he wantonly increased the suffering of his young wife by ordering her to take the vows first. Twenty years afterwards she plaintively tells him the sorrow he gave her by such a command. ‘God knows,’ she says, ‘I should not have hesitated, at your command, to precede or to follow you to hell itself.’ She was ‘profoundly grieved and ashamed’ at the distrust which seemed to be implied in his direction. But hers was the love that ‘is stronger than death,’ and she complied without a murmur, making of her sunny nature one more victim on the altar of masculine selfishness.