But she was overruled, and the private marriage took place.  Now for Fulbert!  The heart so wounded should be healed at last; the proud spirit so tortured should find rest again; the humbled head should be lifted up once more.  He proclaimed the marriage in the high places of the city and rejoiced that dishonor had departed from his house.  But lo!  Abelard denied the marriage!  Heloise denied it!  The people, knowing the former circumstances, might have believed Fulbert had only Abelard denied it, but when the person chiefly interested—­the girl herself—­denied it, they laughed, despairing Fulbert to scorn.

The poor canon of the cathedral of Paris was spiked again.  The last hope of repairing the wrong that had been done his house was gone.  What next?  Human nature suggested revenge.  He compassed it.  The historian says: 

          “Ruffians, hired by Fulbert, fell upon Abelard by night, and
          inflicted upon him a terrible and nameless mutilation.”

I am seeking the last resting place of those “ruffians.”  When I find it I shall shed some tears on it, and stack up some bouquets and immortelles, and cart away from it some gravel whereby to remember that howsoever blotted by crime their lives may have been, these ruffians did one just deed, at any rate, albeit it was not warranted by the strict letter of the law.

Heloise entered a convent and gave good-bye to the world and its pleasures for all time.  For twelve years she never heard of Abelard —­never even heard his name mentioned.  She had become prioress of Argenteuil and led a life of complete seclusion.  She happened one day to see a letter written by him, in which he narrated his own history.  She cried over it and wrote him.  He answered, addressing her as his “sister in Christ.”  They continued to correspond, she in the unweighed language of unwavering affection, he in the chilly phraseology of the polished rhetorician.  She poured out her heart in passionate, disjointed sentences; he replied with finished essays, divided deliberately into heads and sub-heads, premises and argument.  She showered upon him the tenderest epithets that love could devise, he addressed her from the North Pole of his frozen heart as the “Spouse of Christ!” The abandoned villain!

On account of her too easy government of her nuns, some disreputable irregularities were discovered among them, and the Abbot of St. Denis broke up her establishment.  Abelard was the official head of the monastery of St. Gildas de Ruys, at that time, and when he heard of her homeless condition a sentiment of pity was aroused in his breast (it is a wonder the unfamiliar emotion did not blow his head off,) and he placed her and her troop in the little oratory of the Paraclete, a religious establishment which he had founded.  She had many privations and sufferings to undergo at first, but her worth and her gentle disposition won influential friends for her, and she built up a