ect was to condemn me." He even cherished
the idea of flying from Christendom, to live among the infidels. When
the abbacy of Saint-Gildas de Rhuys, a remote place on the coast of
Brittany, was offered to him, he hastened to accept, thinking that if he
gave up teaching the persecution would cease. This was about 1128, and
for nearly ten years Abelard struggled on there. It was a struggle, for
he found the monks not only undisciplined, and given to licentious
pleasures, but positively criminal. One gets a picture of the abbot and
the abbey in Longfellow's _Golden Legend_, where Lucifer, in the guise
of a monk, gets into the refectory of the convent of Hirschau and tells
the monks how much more delightful is life in his own abbey of
Saint-Gildas de Rhuys:

From the gray rocks of Morbihan
It overlooks the angry sea;
The very sea-shore where,
In his great despair,
Abbot Abelard walked to and fro,
Filling the night with woe,
And wailing aloud to the merciless seas
The name of his sweet Heloise!
Whilst overhead
The convent windows gleamed as red
As the fiery eyes of the monks within,
Who with jovial din
Gave themselves up to all kinds of sin!.
Abelard!...
He was a dry old fellow....
There he stood,
Lowering at us in sullen mood,
As if he had come into Brittany
Just to reform our brotherhood!...
Well, it finally came to pass
That, half in fun and half in malice,
One Sunday at Mass
We put some poison into the chalice.
But, either by accident or design,
Peter Abelard kept away
From the chapel that day,
And a poor, young friar, who in his stead
Drank the sacramental wine,
Fell on the steps of the altar, dead!

The facts here presented are essentially the same as those vouched for
by Abelard himself, even to the poisoning of the young monk. There were
two attempts of this kind, and the wicked monks also hired assassins to
waylay their abbot, who lived in constant terror of his life. He strove
to control his monks by every sort of means, but at length was forced to
fly to the protection of a friend in Brittany. He did not definitely
abandon his abbey for some time, probably not before 1138; but his
regular connection with it ceased some years earlier.

The years of his struggle with the mo