His imprisonment did not last long. When the proceedings of the council were made known throughout the kingdom, there was a strong outburst of indignation. It must not be supposed that the Council of Soissons illustrates or embodies the spirit of the period or the spirit of the Church; this feature we shall more nearly find in the Council of Sens, in 1141. The conventicle had, in truth, revealed some of the evils of the time: the danger of the Church’s excessively political attitude and administration, the brutality of the spirit it engendered with regard to heresy, the fatal predominance of dogma over ethic. But, in the main, the conventicle exhibits the hideous triumph of a few perverse individuals, who availed themselves of all that was crude and ill-advised in the machinery of the Church. When, therefore, such men as Tirric, and Geoffrey of Chartres, and Geoffrey of the Stag’s-neck, spread their story abroad, there were few who did not sympathise with Abélard. The persecutors soon found it necessary to defend themselves; there was a chaos of mutual incriminations. Even Alberic and Lotulphe tried to cast the blame on others. The legate found it expedient to attribute the whole proceeding openly to ‘French malice.’ He had been ‘compelled for a time to humour their spleen,’ as Abélard puts it, but he presently revoked the order of confinement in St. Médard, and gave Abélard permission to return to St. Denis. It was a question of Scylla or Charybdis, of Prior Goswin or Abbot Adam. The legate seems to have acted in good faith in granting the permission—perhaps we should say in good policy, for he again acted out of discreet regard for circumstances; but when we find Abélard availing himself of what was no more than a permission to return to St. Denis we have a sufficient indication of the quality of his experience at St. Médard. He does indeed remark that the monks of the reformed abbey had been friendly towards him, though this is inspired by an obvious comparison with his later experience at St. Denis. But St. Médard was a prison; that sufficed to turn the scale. A removal from the penitentiary would be equivalent, in the eyes of France, to a revocation of the censure passed on him. So with a heart that was hopelessly drear, not knowing whether to smile or weep, he went back, poor sport of the gods as he was, to the royal abbey.