While visiting a friend, during one of his enforced flights from Saint-Gildas, Abélard wrote the history of his woes, _Historia Calamitatum_, to which we owe most of the details given previously. This work, in the form of a letter, is addressed to a friend whose name we do not know. Abélard calls him "my old friend and very dear brother in Christ, my intimate companion," so that it is at least certain that he was a clerk. It may have been that this letter was meant for Peter the Venerable, who afterward showed himself a devoted friend to Abélard as well as to Héloïse. But to whomsoever the letter was written, it came into the hands of her who had sacrificed so much for the writer. All the old love awoke in Héloïse's heart when chance threw in her way the story, in Abélard's own hand, of their misfortunes. Moved beyond her powers of repression, her feelings overflowed in a beautiful letter to her lost husband. In all the literature of love there is nothing finer than this letter, either for passion or for tenderness and pathos. It is no wonder that Abélard replied, as she besought him to do. A sort of correspondence was opened; she wrote three letters in all, and he four. The actual text of these letters is in a Latin manuscript of a date one hundred years later than the time of Héloïse. The preservation of such a series of letters has seemed to some investigators improbable, but there is every reason to believe that Héloïse herself would have collected and preserved with the greatest care a correspondence so precious to her. That the letters excited the highest admiration from the very first we have ample proof, for one of the authors of the _Romance of the Rose_, Jean Clopinel, translated them as early as 1285. In the fifteenth century they were printed, and since then numberless translations, imitations, and perversions have appeared. We need feel no doubt, therefore, that we are reading an actual love letter, dating from about 1135, when we follow the glowing lines addressed to Abélard by Héloïse. There is naturally a marked difference in the tone of the letters, due to a difference of character and to different environment. While passages in the first letter of Héloïse are almost lyric in their intensity, like the words of a Juliet, at times almost of a Sappho, the reply from Abélard is apparently cold in many places, certainly constrained, only occasionally throbbing an answer to the touch of her whom he had loved. As we shall have some very unfavorable things to say of Abélard's character in general, it seems but fair to say that this constraint and evident desire to suppress the violence of Héloïse's love and to direct her thoughts to the duties of her calling cannot be charged against him as a fault. Not one of his replies shows lack of affection. In justice to him we may say that he was seeking to teach her resignation; to divert her thoughts from the past, where was only storm and shipwreck in their brief love.