for their benefit that he scandalized the neighbourhood and had to argue at unnecessary length his innocence of evil.  He went so far as to express a wish to take refuge among them and to abandon his abbey in Brittany.  He professed to stand in terror of his monks; he excommunicated them; they paid no attention to him; he appealed to the Pope, his friend, and Innocent sent a special legate to enforce their submission “in presence of the Count and the Bishops.”

Even since that, they would not keep quiet.  And quite recently, since the expulsion of those of whom I have spoken, when I returned to the abbey, abandoning myself to the rest of the brothers who inspired me with less distrust, I found them even worse than the others.  It was no longer a question of poison; it was the dagger that they now sharpened against my breast.  I had great difficulty in escaping from them under the guidance of one of the neighbouring lords.  Similar perils menace me still and every day I see the sword raised over my head.  Even at table I can hardly breathe ...  This is the torture that I endure every moment of the day; I, a poor monk, raised to the prelacy, becoming more miserable in becoming more great, that by my example the ambitious may learn to curb their greed.

With this, the “Story of Calamity” ends.  The allusions to Innocent ii seem to prove that it was written not earlier than 1132; the confession of constant and abject personal fear suggests that it was written under the shock caused by the atrocious murder of the Prior of Saint-Victor by the nephews of the Archdeacon of Paris, who had also been subjected to reforms.  This murder was committed a few miles outside of the walls of Paris, on August 20, 1133.  The “Story of Calamity” is evidently a long plea for release from the restraints imposed on its author by his position in the prelacy and the tacit, or possibly the express, contract he had made, or to which he had submitted, in 1125.  This plea was obviously written in order to serve one of two purposes:—­either to be placed before the authorities whose consent alone could relieve Abelard from his restraints; or to justify him in throwing off the load of the Church, and resuming the profession of schoolman.  Supposing the second explanation, the date of the paper would be more or less closely fixed by John of Salisbury, who coming to Paris as a student, in 1136, found Abelard lecturing on the Mont-Sainte-Genevieve; that is to say, not under the license of the Bishop of Paris or his Chancellor, but independently, in a private school of his own, outside the walls.  “I attached myself to the Palatine Peripatician who then presided on the hill of Sainte-Genevieve, the doctor illustrious, admired by all.  There, at his feet, I received the first elements of the dialectic art, and according to the measure of my poor understanding I received with all the avidity of my soul everything that came from his mouth.”