she was anything but Abelard's mistress. Beside
himself with anger and shame, Fulbert grew so violent that Heloise fled
to a nunnery at Argenteuil, near Paris, Abelard aiding her in her
flight. At Argenteuil Abelard had her dressed in the monastic habit,
though she did not take the vows.

We must admit that there were some grounds for supposing, as Fulbert and
his family believed, that Abelard meant to rid himself of his wife by
having her shut up in the convent: and they had experienced enough of
her self-sacrificing firmness to know that she would offer no resistance
to Abelard's wishes, if such were his wishes. Determined at least to
punish him, they bribed one of his servants, broke into his house at
night, and inflicted upon him the most severe and brutal mutilation. If
Heloise was forced to be a nun, Abelard should be fit for nothing but a
monk.

The perpetrators of this Draconian vengeance fled. Paris was all agog
with the shame of the brilliant philosopher. There were partisans in
plenty on his side, and Abelard takes pleasure in telling us that two of
the perpetrators of the crime, including his servant, were captured,
blinded, and mutilated as he had been. The justice of the Middle Ages
never erred on the side of mercy. Abelard fell into the most abject
despair, but still we see in him the same dominant regard to his career
in the world. When his friends came about him, particularly the clerks,
with their lamentations and their manifestations of compassion, he says:
"I suffered more from their compassion than from the pain of my wound; I
felt my shame more than my actual mutilation." He felt not only the
shame, but the ruin of all his ambitions. "In this state of hopelessness
and of utter confusion it was, I admit, rather a feeling of shame than
predilection for the vocation that impelled me towards the shades of a
cloister." Ever ready to obey his wishes, Heloise took the veil in the
convent of Argenteuil at the same time that Abelard entered the abbey of
Saint-Denis. Heloise was not yet twenty; did her youthful heart, full of
love of life, yearn for the cramped life of the nunnery? We shall later
see what she herself says upon this score; for the present suffice it to
note that even Abelard pauses in the account of his woes to praise her
complete abnegation of self, and to tell us that she went to the altar
where the irrevocable vows were to be taken, repeating in the midst of
her sobs the lament of Cornel