and conspicuous unless it were the city of Troyes itself, the capital of Champagne, some thirty miles away.  The proof that he meant to be aggressive is furnished by his own account of the consequences.  Two rivals, he says, one of whom seems to have been Bernard of Clairvaux, took the field against him, “and succeeded in exciting the hostility of certain ecclesiastical and secular authorities, by charging monstrous things, not only against my faith, but also against my manner of life, to such a point as to detach from me some of my principal friends; even those who preserved some affection for me dared no longer display it, for fear.  God is my witness that I never heard of the union of an ecclesiastical assembly without thinking that its object was my condemnation.”  The Church had good reason, for Abelard’s conduct defied discipline; but far from showing harshness, the Church this time showed a true spirit of conciliation most creditable to Bernard.  Deeply as the Cistercians disliked and distrusted Abelard, they did not violently suppress him, but tacitly consented to let the authorities buy his silence with Church patronage.

The transaction passed through Suger’s hands, and offered an ordinary example of political customs as old as history.  An abbey in Brittany became vacant; at a hint from the Duke Conan, which may well be supposed to have been suggested from Paris, the monks chose Abelard as their new abbot, and sent some of their number to Suger to request permission for Abelard, who was a monk of Saint-Denis, to become Abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, near Vannes, in Brittany.  Suger probably intimated to Abelard, with a certain degree of authority, that he had better accept.  Abelard, “struck with terror, and as it were under the menace of a thunderbolt,” accepted.  Of course the dignity was in effect banishment and worse, and was so understood on all sides.  The Abbaye-de-Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, though less isolated than Mont-Saint-Michel, was not an agreeable winter residence.  Though situated in Abelard’s native province of Brittany, only sixty or eighty miles from his birthplace, it was for him a prison with the ocean around it and a singularly wild people to deal with; but he could have endured his lot with contentment, had not discipline or fear or pledge compelled him to hold his tongue.  From 1125, when he was sent to Brittany until 1135 when he reappeared in Paris, he never opened his mouth to lecture.  “Never, as God is my witness,—­never would I have acquiesced in such an offer, had it not been to escape, no matter how, from the vexations with which I was incessantly overwhelmed.”