By the terms of Suger’s decision Abélard could neither lodge with secular friends nor enter any cell, priory, or abbey. Probably this coercion into leading an eremitical life was unnecessary. The experience of the last three years had made a hermitage of his heart; nothing would be more welcome to him than this quiet valley. It was a spot he had noticed in earlier years. In his ancient chronicle Robert of Auxerre says that Abélard had lived there before; Mr. Poole thinks it was to the same part of Champagne that he resorted on the three occasions of his going to the province of Count Theobald. That would at least have to be understood in a very loose sense. On the two former occasions he had found a home prepared, a cell and a priory, respectively; he had now to build a hut with his own hands. It was a deserted spot he had chosen, he tells us; and Heloise adds, in one of her letters, that before Abélard’s coming it had been the haunt of robbers and the home of foxes and wild boars, like the neighbouring forest of Fontainebleau. Abélard must have seen this quiet side-valley in passing along the Seine on the road to Paris. It was some twelve miles from Troyes, where he had a number of friends; and when he expressed a desire to retire to it with his companion, they obtained for him the gift of the meadow through which the Arduzon ran. Bishop Hatton gave them permission to build an oratory, and they put together a kind of mud hut—‘in honour of the Blessed Trinity’! Here the heavy heart began once more to dream of peace. Men had tortured him with a caricature of the divine justice when his aim and purpose had been of the purest. He had left their ignorant meddlesomeness and their ugly passions far away beyond the forests. Alone with God and with nature in her fairest mood, he seemed to have escaped securely from an age that could not, or would not, understand his high ideal. So for some time no sound was heard in the valley but the song of the birds and the grave talk of the two hermits and the frequent chant in the frail temple of the Trinity. But Abélard’s evil genius was never far from him; it almost seems as if it only retired just frequently enough and long enough to let his heart regain its full power of suffering. The unpractical scholar had overlooked a material point, the question of sustenance. Beech-nuts and beech-leaves and roots and the water of the river become monotonous. Abélard began to cast about for some source of revenue. ‘To dig I was not able, to beg I was ashamed,’ he says, in the familiar words. There was only one thing he could do—teach.