s had grown worse.
St. Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as "a house of
Satan, a den of thieves." "The walls of the churches of Christ were
resplendent with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish;
their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to
charm the eyes of the rich."

In 1095 the task of cleansing the Abbey of St. Maur des Fosses at
Paris seemed so hopeless, that the abbot resigned in despair rather
than imperil his soul, and a more resolute reformer was sought. In
1107 the bishop of Paris was commanded by Rome to proceed to the abbey
of St. Eloy and extirpate the evils there flourishing, for the nuns,
it was reported, had so declined in grace, owing to the proximity of
the court and intercourse with the world, that they had lost all sense
of shame and lived in open sin, breaking the bonds of common decency.
The scandal was so great that the bishop determined to cut them off
from the house of the Lord; the abbey was reduced to a priory and
given over to the abbot of the now reformed monastery of St. Maur, and
its vast lands were parcelled out into several parishes.[44] The
rights of the canons of Notre Dame were to be maintained; on St.
Eloy's day the abbot of St. Maur was to furnish them with six pigs,
two and a half measures of wine and three of fine wheat, and on St.
Paul's day with eight sheep, the same quantity of wine, six crowns and
one obole. The present Rue de la Cite and the Boulevard du Palais give
approximately the east and west boundaries of the suppressed abbey,
part of whose site is now occupied by the Prefecture de Police.

[Footnote 44: The reformers always discover the nunneries to be so
much more corrupt than the monasteries, but it is a little suspicious
that in every case the former are expropriated to the latter. The
abbot of St. Maur evidently had some qualms concerning the
expropriation of St. Eloy, and wished to restore it to the bishop.]

But the way of the reformer is a hard one. At the Council of Paris,
1074, the abbot of Pontoise was severely ill-treated for supporting,
against the majority of the Council, the pope's decrees excluding
married clerics from the churches, and the reform of the canons of
Notre Dame led to exciting scenes. Bishop Stephen of Senlis was sent
in 1128 to introduce the new discipline, but the archdeacons and
canons, supported by royal favour, resisted, and Bishop Stephen was
stripped of his revenues and hastened ba