his way to Rome, whither he was journeying in
order to undergo a penalty; and his body was brought back to the
Paraclete, where it was entombed. Over it for twenty-two years Heloise
watched with tender care; and when she died, her body was laid beside
that of her lover.

To-day their bones are mingled as she would have desired them to be
mingled. The stones of their tomb in the great cemetery of Pere
Lachaise were brought from the ruins of the Paraclete, and above the
sarcophagus are two recumbent figures, the whole being the work of the
artist Alexandra Lenoir, who died in 1836. The figure representing
Heloise is not, however, an authentic likeness. The model for it was a
lady belonging to a noble family of France, and the figure itself was
brought to Pere Lachaise from the ancient College de Beauvais.

The letters of Heloise have been read and imitated throughout the whole
of the last nine centuries. Some have found in them the utterances of a
woman whose love of love was greater than her love of God and whose
intensity of passion nothing could subdue; and so these have condemned
her. But others, like Chateaubriand, have more truly seen in them a
pure and noble spirit to whom fate had been very cruel; and who was,
after all, writing to the man who had been her lawful husband.

Some of the most famous imitations of her letters are those in the
ancient poem entitled, "The Romance of the Rose," written by Jean de
Meung, in the thirteenth century; and in modern times her first letter
was paraphrased by Alexander Pope, and in French by Colardeau. There
exist in English half a dozen translations of them, with Abelard's
replies. It is interesting to remember that practically all the other
writings of Abelard remained unpublished and unedited until a very
recent period. He was a remarkable figure as a philosopher and scholar;
but the world cares for him only because he was loved by Heloise.

QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE EARL OF LEICESTER

History has many romantic stories to tell of the part which women have
played in determining the destinies of nations. Sometimes it is a
woman's beauty that causes the shifting of a province. Again it is
another woman's rich possessions that incite invasion and lead to
bloody wars. Marriages or dowries, or the refusal of marriages and the
lack of dowries, inheritance through an heiress, the failure of a male
succession--in these and in many other ways women have set their mark
indeli