In these circumstances was written the famous letter of Prior Fulques, to which we have referred more than once. It is a characteristic piece of mediæval diplomacy. Fulques was the prior of Deuil, in the valley of Montmorency, a dependency of the abbey of St. Florent de Saumur. He was apparently requested by the abbot of St. Denis to persuade Abélard to let the matter rest. At all events, he begins his letter with a rhetorical description of Abélard’s success as a teacher, depicting Britons and Italians and Spaniards braving the terrors of the sea, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, under the fascination of Abélard’s repute. Then, with a view to dissuading him from the threatened appeal to Rome, he reminds him of his destitution and of the notorious avarice of Rome. There is no reason why we should hesitate to accept Fulques’s assertion that Abélard had no wealth to offer the abbey when he entered it. If, as seems to be the more correct proceeding, we follow the opinion that he spent the interval between the first withdrawal of Heloise and the marriage with her at Pallet, he cannot have earned much during the preceding two or three years. He was hardly likely to be a provident and economical person. Most of whatever money he earned, after he first began to serve up stale dishes to his students in the absorption of his passion, would probably pass into the coffers of Fulbert or, later, of the nunnery at Argenteuil. There is no need whatever to entertain theories of licentiousness from that ground. We have, moreover, already sufficiently discussed that portion of Fulques’s letter. But the second part of the prior’s argument, the avarice of Rome, requires a word of comment. It is characteristic of the ecclesiastical historian that in Migne’s version of Fulques’s letter the indictment of Abélard is given without comment, and the indictment of Rome is unblushingly omitted. It might be retorted that such historians as Deutsch and Hausrath insert the indictment against Rome, and make a thousand apologies for inserting the charge against Abélard. The retort would be entirely without sting, since a mass of independent evidence sustains the one charge, whilst the other is at variance with evidence. The passage omitted in Migne, which refers to Abélard’s proposal to appeal to Rome, runs as follows. ‘O pitiful and wholly useless proposal! Hast thou never heard of the avarice and the impurity of Rome? Who is wealthy enough to satisfy that devouring whirlpool of harlotry? Who would ever be able to fill their avaricious purses? Thy resources are entirely insufficient for a visit to the Roman Pontiff.... For all those who have approached that see in our time without a weight of gold have lost their cause, and have returned in confusion and disgrace.’