Abélard had, of course, committed another serious blunder in accepting the proffered ‘dignity.’ There was an error on both sides, as there had been in his first fatal assumption of the cowl; though on this occasion the pressure behind him was greater, the alternative less clear, and the prospect at least uncertain. It will be remembered that Abélard probably studied at Locmenach in his early years. This was a branch monastery of the ancient abbey of St. Gildas at Rhuys, on the coast; and it is not impossible that some recollection of the monks of Locmenach entered into his decision to become abbot of St. Gildas. There were probably few abbeys in France at the time which were sufficiently moral and earnest in their life to offer a congenial home to this man who is held up to the blushes of the ages as a sinner, and of whom the Church only speaks in the low and solemn tone that befits a great scandal. If Abélard’s first and chief misfortune is that he was a Christian, his second is that he was a monk. The abbey of St. Gildas had reached the last stage of monastic decay. The monks did not accept presents of pretty maid-servants, nor receive fine lady visitors in their abbey, like the monks of St. Denis; nor were they eager to have a nunnery of sisters in religion close at hand, like the cloistered canons. Theirs was not a case for the application of the words of Erasmus: ‘Vocantur “patres”—et saepe sunt.’ Each monk had a respectable wife and family on the monastic estate. The outlying farms and cottages were colonised with the women and the little monklings; there was no cemetery of infant bones at or near St. Gildas. Their monasticism consisted in the discharge of their formal religious exercises in church and choir—the chant of the Mass and of the breviary. And when the monk had done his day’s work of seven or eight hours’ chanting, he would retire, like every other Christian, to the bosom of his family. The half-civilised Celtic population of the district were quite content with this version of their duty, and did not refuse them the customary sustenance. Abélard’s horror on discovering this state of things was equalled by the surprise of the monks when they discovered his Quixotic ideas of monastic life. They only knew Abélard as the amorous troubadour, the teacher who attracted crowds of gay and wealthy scholars wherever he went, the object of the bitter hostility of the monastic reformers whom they detested. It was the Bernardist or Norbertian Abélard whom they had chosen for their abbot. Surprise quickly turned to disgust when the new abbot lectured them in chapter—as a sexless ascetic could so well do—on the beauty of continence and the Rule of St. Benedict. They were rough, ignorant, violent men, and they soon made it clear that reform was hopelessly out of the question.