tes.

Bertrade's last card was played, and she succumbed to her defeat. Though
still in the height of her beauty, with not a wrinkle on her brow, she
retired to the convent of Haute Bruyere, a dependency of the famous
monastery of Fontevrault. Whether or not she was truly penitent for the
evil life she had led we do not know. But there was to be short time
left her for the cultivation of the monastic virtues; for the austerity
of the new life soon wore her out, and she died in the convent.

CHAPTER II

FAMOUS LOVERS

In Pere Lachaise, the famous cemetery of Paris, there is none among the
hundreds of monuments upon which the traveller looks with more interest
than that of the lovely and unhappy Heloise. There her body lies, with
that of her lover-husband, Pierre Abelard. It is her story that we wish
to tell; but her fame and that of Abelard are so intimately associated
that one cannot tell of Heloise without first telling something of
Abelard. The debt to fame, however, is not all on her side; to translate
the words of a great French historian: "Alone, the name of Abelard would
be known to-day only to scholars: linked with the name of Heloise, it is
in every heart. Paris, above all,... has kept the memory of the immortal
daughter of the Cite with exceptional and unchanging fidelity. The
eighteenth century and the Revolution, so pitiless towards the Middle
Ages, revived this tradition with the same ardor which led them to
destroy so many other memories. The children of Rousseau's disciples
still go in pilgrimage to the monument of this great saint of love, and
each spring sees pious women placing fresh crowns of flowers upon the
tomb in which the Revolution reunited the two lovers." We shall not,
therefore, attempt to part those whom love has for more than seven
centuries joined together, and shall tell of Abelard as well as of
Heloise.

The great University of Paris was already famous in the twelfth century.
Professors, most of them ecclesiastics, lectured on all the foolish
subtilties of the learning of the day to crowds of students collected
from every quarter of Europe. At the monastic school of Notre Dame the
most distinguished lecturer on dialectic,--meaning philosophy and logic
as applied to philosophy,--at the close of the eleventh century, was
Guillaume de Champeaux. The method of instruction was, necessarily,
almost entirely oral, for books were worth almost their weight in coin.
It was the custom fo