We may best remember the great controversialist when he is lying dead in his new-found peace and childlikeness. At the request of Heloise, Peter of Cluny delivered up his body to be buried within the walls of the Paraclete, in defiance of any misconstruction or of any sneer. He accompanied the act with the absolution which she asked. It reads thus: “I, Peter, Abbot of Cluny, who received Peter Abelard as a Cluniac monk, and who have granted his body to be delivered secretly [_furtim delatum_, wrote the big-hearted bishop] to Heloise, the abbess, and to the nuns of the Paraclete, by the authority of the Omnipotent God and of all saints, do absolve him in virtue of my office from all his sins.” This was to have been engraved upon a metal plate and fastened above the tomb of the dead rhetorician, but for some reason—perhaps connected with the _furtim delatum_—the plan was never carried out. But the absolution was probably attached to the tomb for a short time in order to make it effective. “Women,” says Mrs. Browning, “are knights-errant to the last.” For a score of years, Heloise went each evening to that tomb to weep and pray. She remembered and observed nothing of those unpleasant traits which later times have noticed. If she ever cursed any one it must have been Fulbert, or others of the dead man’s enemies, and “A curse from the depths of womanhood Is very salt and bitter and good.” At length, like every watching and every waiting, this, too, came to an end, and she died on May 17th, 1164, precisely at his age of sixty-three years. And they laid her beside him in the same grave, as was meet and right.