For a crowning humiliation Abélard was consigned by the council to a large monastery near Soissons, which served as jail or penitentiary for that ecclesiastical province. The abbot of this monastery, Geoffrey of the Stag’s-neck, had assisted at the council, and Dom Gervaise would have it that he had secured Abélard for his own purposes. He thinks the abbot was looking to the great legal advantage, in the frequent event of a lawsuit, of having such an orator as Abélard in his monastery. It is a possibility, like many other details in Gervaise’s _Life of Abélard_. In forbidding his return either to Maisoncelle or to St. Denis, and definitely consigning him to the abbey of St. Médard, the council was once more treating him as a legally convicted heretic. As far as it was concerned, it was filling the chalice of the poor monk’s bitterness. It is a mere accident that Geoffrey was a man of some culture, and was so far influenced by the hideous spectacle he had witnessed as to receive Brother Peter with sympathy and some honour. CHAPTER VIII CLOUD UPON CLOUD The abbey of St. Médard, to which Abélard accompanied his friendly jailer, was a very large monastery on the right bank of the Aisne, just outside Soissons. At that time it had a community of about four hundred monks. It derived a considerable revenue from its two hundred and twenty farms, yet it bore so high a repute for regular discipline that it had become a general ‘reformatory school’ for the district. ‘To it were sent the ignorant to be instructed, the depraved to be corrected, the obstinate to be tamed,’ says a work of the time; though it is not clear how Herr Hausrath infers from this that the abbey also served the purpose of monastic asylum. For this character of penitentiary the place was chosen for the confinement of Abélard. Thither he retired to meditate on the joy and the wisdom of ‘conversion.’ ‘God! How furiously did I accuse Thee!’ he says of those days. The earlier wound had been preceded, he admits, by his sin; this far deeper and more painful wound had been brought upon him by his ‘love of our faith.’