aken an oath
that he would no longer levy taxes and subsidies. The Pope freed him
from this pledge. He had promised to give Notre-Dame de Nantes his
weight in gold; but as he weighed nearly two hundred pounds, he remained
greatly indebted. With all that he was able to pick up or snatch away,
he quickly formed a league and compelled the house of Penthievre to buy
the peace which they had sold to him.

On the other side of the Sevre, a forest covers the hill with its fresh,
green maze of trees; it is _La Garenne_, a park that is beautiful in
itself, in spite of the artificial embellishments that have been
introduced. M. Semot, (the father of the present owner), was a painter
of the Empire and a laureate, and he tried to reproduce to the best of
his ability that cold Italian, republican, Roman style, which was so
popular in the time of Canova and of Madame de Stael. In those days
people were inclined to be pompous and noble. They used to place
chiselled urns on graves and paint everybody in a flowing cloak, and
with long hair; then Corinne sang to the accompaniment of her lyre
beside Oswald, who wore Russian boots; and it was thought proper to have
everybody's head adorned with a profusion of dishevelled locks and to
have a multitude of ruins in every landscape.

This style of embellishment abounds throughout La Garenne. There is a
temple erected to Vesta, and directly opposite it another erected to
Friendship....

Inscriptions, artificial rocks, factitious ruins, are scattered
lavishly, with artlessness and conviction.... But the poetical riches
centre in the grotto of Heloise, a sort of natural dolmen on the bank of
the Sevre.

Why have people made Heloise, who was such a great and noble figure,
appear commonplace and silly, the prototype of all crossed loves and the
narrow ideal of sentimental schoolgirls? The unfortunate mistress of the
great Abelard deserved a better fate, for she loved him with devoted
admiration, although he was hard and taciturn at times and spared her
neither bitterness nor blows. She dreaded offending him more than she
dreaded offending God, and strove harder to please him. She did not wish
him to marry her, because she thought that "it was wrong and deplorable
that the one whom nature had created for all ... should be appropriated
by one woman." She found, she said, "more happiness in the appellation
of mistress or concubine, than in that of wife or empress," and by
humiliating herself in h