o increase their respect by my very bodily presence
in such a way as to give me, at the same time, a better opportunity to
look out for their wants." When or how often he visited the Paraclete we
do not know; but in some of these visits Heloise and Abelard must have
met again.

While visiting a friend, during one of his enforced flights from
Saint-Gildas, Abelard wrote the history of his woes, _Historia
Calamitatum_, to which we owe most of the details given previously. This
work, in the form of a letter, is addressed to a friend whose name we do
not know. Abelard calls him "my old friend and very dear brother in
Christ, my intimate companion," so that it is at least certain that he
was a clerk. It may have been that this letter was meant for Peter the
Venerable, who afterward showed himself a devoted friend to Abelard as
well as to Heloise. But to whomsoever the letter was written, it came
into the hands of her who had sacrificed so much for the writer. All the
old love awoke in Heloise's heart when chance threw in her way the
story, in Abelard's own hand, of their misfortunes. Moved beyond her
powers of repression, her feelings overflowed in a beautiful letter to
her lost husband. In all the literature of love there is nothing finer
than this letter, either for passion or for tenderness and pathos. It is
no wonder that Abelard replied, as she besought him to do. A sort of
correspondence was opened; she wrote three letters in all, and he four.
The actual text of these letters is in a Latin manuscript of a date one
hundred years later than the time of Heloise. The preservation of such a
series of letters has seemed to some investigators improbable, but there
is every reason to believe that Heloise herself would have collected and
preserved with the greatest care a correspondence so precious to her.
That the letters excited the highest admiration from the very first we
have ample proof, for one of the authors of the _Romance of the Rose_,
Jean Clopinel, translated them as early as 1285. In the fifteenth
century they were printed, and since then numberless translations,
imitations, and perversions have appeared. We need feel no doubt,
therefore, that we are reading an actual love letter, dating from about
1135, when we follow the glowing lines addressed to Abelard by Heloise.

There is naturally a marked difference in the tone of the letters, due
to a difference of character and to different environment. While
passages i