A great career in the Church was thus opened for him against his will, and if he did not die an archbishop it was not wholly the fault of the Church.  Already he was a great prelate, the equal in rank of the Abbe Suger, himself, of Saint-Denis; of Peter the Venerable of Cluny; of Bernard of Clairvaux.  He was in a manner a peer of the realm.  Almost immediately he felt the advantages of the change.  Barely two years passed when, in 1127, the Abbe Suger, in reforming his subordinate Abbey of Argenteuil, was obliged to disturb Heloise, then a sister in that congregation.  Abelard was warned of the necessity that his wife should be protected, and with the assistance of everyone concerned, he was allowed to establish his wife at the Paraclete as head of a religious sisterhood.  “I returned there; I invited Heloise to come there with the nuns of her community; and when they arrived, I made them the entire donation of the oratory and its dependencies ...  The bishops cherished her as their daughter; the abbots as their sister; the laymen as their mother.”  This was merely the beginning of her favour and of his.  For ten years they were both of them petted children of the Church.

The formal establishment of Heloise at the Paraclete took place in 1129.  In February, 1130, on the death of the Pope at Rome, a schism broke out, and the cardinals elected two popes, one of whom took the name of Innocent ii, and appealed for support to France.  Suger saw a great political opportunity and used it.  The heads of the French Church agreed in supporting Innocent, and the King summoned a Church council at Etampes to declare its adhesion.  The council met in the late summer; Bernard of Clairvaux took the lead; Peter the Venerable, Suger of Saint-Denis, and the Abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys supported him; Innocent himself took refuge at Cluny in October, and on January 20, 1131, he stopped at the Benedictine Abbey of Morigny.  The Chronicle of the monastery, recording the abbots present on this occasion,—­the Abbot of Morigny itself, of Feversham; of Saint-Lucien of Beauvais, and so forth,—­added especially:  “Bernard of Clairvaux, who was then the most famous pulpit orator in France; and Peter Abelard, Abbot of Saint-Gildas, also a monk and the most eminent master of the schools to which the scholars of almost all the Latin races flowed.”

Innocent needed popular support; Bernard and Abelard were the two leaders of popular opinion in France.  To attach them, Innocent could refuse nothing.  Probably Abelard remained with Innocent, but in any case Innocent gave him, at Auxerre, in the following November, a diploma, granting to Heloise, prioress of the Oratory of the Holy Trinity, all rights of property over whatever she might possess, against all assailants; which proves Abelard’s favour.  At this time he seems to have taken great interest in the new sisterhood.  “I made them more frequent visits,” he said, “in order to work for their benefit.”  He worked so earnestly