But such an episode was only too characteristic of the decay which seemed inevitably to fall on each of the monastic Orders. The wealth and privileges of Cluny made its failure all the more conspicuous. A few years after the expulsion of Pontius, St. Bernard wrote to the Abbot of the Cluniac house of St. Thierry a so-called apology, which, while professing a great regard for the Cluniacs Order and pretending to criticise the deficiencies of his own Cistercians, is in reality a scathing attack upon the lapse of the former from the Benedictine rule. He attacks their neglect of manual work and of the rule of silence; their elaborate cookery and nice taste in wines; their interest in the cut and material of their clothes and the luxury of their bed coverlets: the extravagance of the furniture in their chapels, and even the grotesque architecture of their buildings. He especially censures the magnificent state in which the abbots live and with which they travel about, and he declares himself emphatically against that exemption of monasteries from episcopal control which was one of the most prized privileges of the Cluniac Order. Something may perhaps be allowed for exaggeration in this attack; but that there was no serious overstatement is clear from the letters written some years later by Peter the Venerable to St. Bernard, in answer to the accusations made by the Cistercians in general. He justifies the departure from the strict Benedictine rule partly on the ground of its severity, partly because of its unsuitability to the climate; but his defence clearly shows how far, even under so admirable a ruler, the Cluniacs had fallen away from the monastic ideal. [Sidenote: Cistercians.]