Born in 1091, at Fontaines, a castle of his father Tescelin, near Dijon, France, and devotedly instructed by his pious and gentle mother Aleth, Bernard of Clairvaux was from early childhood imbued with an active religious enthusiasm.  When the time came to choose his way of life, instead of going into battle with his knighted brothers, he made them, as well as his uncle the count of Touillon, join a band of thirty companions, with whom he knelt in the rude chapel at Citeaux to beg the tonsure from Abbot Stephen Harding.  To rise at two o’clock in the morning and chant the prayer-offices of the church until nine, to do hard manual labor until two, when the sole meal of the day—­composed of vegetable food only—­was taken, to labor again until nightfall and sing the vespers until an early bedtime hour:  such was the Cistercian’s daily observance of his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience,—­vows which Bernard and his followers were to lay down only upon the cross of ashes spread upon the hard cell floor to receive their outstretched, dying bodies.

[Illustration:  SAINT BERNARD]

Citeaux became famous from the coming of these new recruits.  There was, in those tough old days, a soldierly admiration for faithfulness to discipline; and when Bernard was professed in 1114, Abbot Stephen was obliged to enlarge the field of work.  Bernard was sent in 1115 to build a house and clear and cultivate a farm in a thickly wooded and thief-infested glen to the north of Dijon, known as the Valley of Wormwood.  Here at the age of twenty-four, in a rude house built by their own hands with timber cut from the land, the young abbot and his companions lived like the sturdy pioneers of our Northwest, the earth their floor and narrow wooden bunks in a low dark loft their beds.  Of course the stubborn forest gave way slowly, and grudgingly opened sunny hillsides to the vine and wheat-sheaf.  The name of the settlement was changed to Clairvaux, but for many years the poor monks’ only food was barley bread, with broth made from boiled beech leaves.  Here Tescelin came in his old age to live under the rule of his sons; and Humbeline, the wealthy and rank-proud daughter, one day left her gay retinue at the door of their little abbey and went to join the nuns at Jouilly.

While Bernard was studying and planting at Clairvaux, the word of his piety and worth went everywhere through the land, and he came to be consulted not only by his Superior at Citeaux, but by villein and noble, even to the august persons of Louis the Fat of France and Henry the Norman of England.  His gentleness and integrity became the chief reliance of the royal house of France, and his sermons and letters began to be quoted at council board and synod even as far as Rome.  The austerity and poverty of the Cistercians had caused some friends of the monks of Cluny to fall under Bernard’s zealous indignation.  He wrote to William of St. Thierry a famous letter, mildly termed an Apology; in which, by the most insinuating and biting satire, the laxity and indulgence which had weakened or effaced the power of monastic example (from which arraignment the proud house of Cluny was deemed not to escape scot-free) were lashed with uncompromising courage.