Therefore, with a poisoned soul, he sought the Abbey of St. Denis to hide himself from the gaze of the world. To a man so proud a life without imperial power was a living death. Yet from those walls he issues his edict that Heloise shall take the veil. His vanity led him to carry out the original cause of hostility even to its unalterable result. But Heloise, whatever she might have thought or felt, marched with lofty resignation to her fate. Quoting aloud—as his confession pitifully recalls—the words of Cornelia to Pompey from the “Pharsalia” of Lucan, she takes the vows. Never was there less of religion in such a ceremony! Henceforth she walks like the moon in distant brightness, coming to meet us down the ages as comes the Queen Louise of Gustav Richter’s superb picture. She is transfigured by her self-forgetting love, and “all that is left of her,” in the best and truest sense, is now “pure womanly.” For Abelard at St. Denis the case was different. He found the monks worldly and dissolute and he reproved them. The effect was similar to the case of Lot—the reformer departed with all his belongings. He then renewed his old lectures. His scholars followed him to Maisoncelle, where, in their avidity of knowledge, they overcrowded every resource of shelter and food. He offered them that fascinating combination, dialectics and divinity. Like the saltpetre and the charcoal these were harmless when apart and explosive when together, particularly if you add the sulphurous heart which now smoked in his bosom. A harsh and vindictive tone was given to his disposition, and it was natural that he should be, at least tentatively, a heretic. These moral bruises are worse than any or all physical injuries; the man who has felt them can never be again what he was before. And now Anselm and William and Fulbert and everybody that he had bullied or taunted or threatened turned upon him. The gates to the black cavern of the winds were open and the blasts of fate were icy cold. The papal legate Conan held a council at Soissons in 1121. The opinions of Abelard were received with disfavor. They humiliated the poor wretch among them and made him burn his own book, and then mumble through a _credo_ amid his “sobs and sighs and tears.” These words are his own, and his is also the statement that he was put into the custody of the Abbot of St. Medard and there he was lectured, and even lashed by the convent whip, until he exhibited proper submission. Poetical justice had befallen him. For he confesses, to his shame, that he had coerced and even struck Heloise. Now he, too, was coerced, and he, too, was struck.