Unfortunately for Abélard’s career he was invited by Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral, to enter his household as tutor of his niece, Héloise. It was a rash experiment. In a narrow street of the Cité, twisting about in the space north of the cathedral, the section where the canons and canonesses used to live, there is still shown the site of the garden where tutor and pupil, soon grown lovers, met in secret and plighted a troth that was to bring upon them both suffering and shame--for Abélard the end of his rise in the church, for Héloise, the cloister. They were married and lived for a time where now stands number nine on the Quai aux Fleurs, looking across the Seine to the right bank. Fulbert separated them, but even the conservatives were shocked at the hideous revenge which sent Abélard away from Paris only to be reunited with Héloise after her death in a convent twenty years after the death of her lover. To-day their tomb in Père Lachaise is the most visited of all the resting places of the illustrious in this famous cemetery. Louis VI (1108-1137), called “the Wideawake” and “the Fat,” was a monarch who did much and planned more. Tall, handsome, energetic, serious, he was the author of policies which in later days developed important results. His accession found his kingdom surrounded by nobles who were nominally his subjects but really enemies of uncommon vigor awaiting the first chance to take their liege lord by surprise. He needed something more than his present resources to cope with the situation, and he met it by making for his son an advantageous marriage which won him the adherence of Poitou and Guienne, and by permitting in his adversaries’ domains, _but not in his own_, the establishment of communes--self-governing towns which paid for their privileges by supporting him against the nobles who ordinarily would have received their feudal obedience. Both these steps proved of substantial value to the crown, the first adding a large piece of territory to the royal possessions in the next reign, and the other developing a new social class, the _bourgeoisie_ or town dwelling class, whose democratic spirit grew so rapidly that Louis IX in the next century had to check its advance if he would have his own unchecked. It has never been long subdued, however; it smoldered until it burst into the flame of the Revolution; it persists to-day as the genius of the Third Republic. Paris never was a commune, but, in compensation for remaining under the rulership of the king and his provost (who lived in the Grand Châtelet built to defend the northern end of the bridge from the Cité as the Petit Châtelet held the southern bank) it received certain unusual privileges. Among them was the monopoly of water transportation between Paris and Mantes granted by Louis VI to the Corporation of Water Merchants. This corporation was the most powerful of the merchants’ guilds in whose hands rested the municipal administration.