Meanwhile, though the lectures suffered, and the students saw, and all Paris smiled, Fulbert was totally in the dark. This condition of affairs was predestined to come to an end, and it came in storm and anger. Abelard saw himself forced, against his will, to marry secretly. It was a sting to his egotism that ever rankled. It served, though, to pacify Fulbert and the rest of the relations; and being too glad and too loose-tongued to keep this handsome alliance from the public they presently told everybody. Heloise, thereupon, fearing for Abelard’s ambitious schemes, did not shrink from a point-blank falsehood. She denied the marriage. She had been in Brittany and was now at Argenteuil, of which she was by and by to become the abbess. And she added to her denial the self-abnegating sentiment that Abelard, who was created for all mankind, ought not to be sacrificed by “bondage to a woman.” It was worthy of her who so admired the “philosophic Aspasia,” and whose tutor and lover had done what he could to make her as “free from superstition” as himself. Her moral ideas were what he taught her, and he could not unteach them. Among the complaisant and agreeable nuns of Argenteuil she now resided. It was but a few miles from Paris. Her husband frequently went thither, and in a short time thereafter she was enrolled as a novice. The fact aroused her relatives, and their mutterings became ominous; Fulbert, especially, taking this act in high dudgeon, as though it meant the premeditated repudiation of his niece. Their anger did not stop at words, but, knowing Abelard’s popularity, and fearing to attack him during the day, they bribed his valet and assaulted him by night in his own apartment. It was this blow which flung Abelard from heaven to hell. His hitherto impregnable attitude; his fierce zeal for his opinions; his hopes of a new philosophy which should make his name immortal, all vanished before it as spider-webs break before a sword. And when, conscious that he was no more a god and a hero, but an insulted and defeated man, he rose from his bed of pain, the prospect was not improved. The outpoured indignation of bishops and canons and clergy—the lamentations of the women and the students—did not appease him. A whisper was in his soul like that of Haman’s wife. Mordecai, the despised, was coming to the kingdom and the Agagite was doomed. There were reasons which led him to think of seeking aid from the Pope against his enemies. But Fulk of Deuil, his good friend, advised him not to try it. “You have no money,” said honest, plain spoken Fulk, “and what can you do at Rome without money?” It was bitter truth. Yet the Abbé Migne, forgetting the much worse things Bernard had said of the Roman Curia in the treatise _De Consideratione_, exscinds the passage from Fulk’s letter on the ground that it would cause “scandal to Catholic ears.” Edification first, truth afterward, if at all!