wealthy and flourishing nunnery.  She became a great favorite with the heads of the church, and also the people, though she seldom appeared in public.  She rapidly advanced in esteem, in good report, and in usefulness, and Abelard as rapidly lost ground.  The Pope so honored her that he made her the head of her order.  Abelard, a man of splendid talents, and ranking as the first debater of his time, became timid, irresolute, and distrustful of his powers.  He only needed a great misfortune to topple him from the high position he held in the world of intellectual excellence, and it came.  Urged by kings and princes to meet the subtle St. Bernard in debate and crush him, he stood up in the presence of a royal and illustrious assemblage, and when his antagonist had finished he looked about him and stammered a commencement; but his courage failed him, the cunning of his tongue was gone:  with his speech unspoken, he trembled and sat down, a disgraced and vanquished champion.

He died a nobody, and was buried at Cluny, A.D., 1144.  They removed his body to the Paraclete afterward, and when Heloise died, twenty years later, they buried her with him, in accordance with her last wish.  He died at the ripe age of 64, and she at 63.  After the bodies had remained entombed three hundred years, they were removed once more.  They were removed again in 1800, and finally, seventeen years afterward, they were taken up and transferred to Pere la Chaise, where they will remain in peace and quiet until it comes time for them to get up and move again.

History is silent concerning the last acts of the mountain howitzer.  Let the world say what it will about him, I, at least, shall always respect the memory and sorrow for the abused trust and the broken heart and the troubled spirit of the old smooth-bore.  Rest and repose be his!

Such is the story of Abelard and Heloise.  Such is the history that Lamartine has shed such cataracts of tears over.  But that man never could come within the influence of a subject in the least pathetic without overflowing his banks.  He ought to be dammed—­or leveed, I should more properly say.  Such is the history—­not as it is usually told, but as it is when stripped of the nauseous sentimentality that would enshrine for our loving worship a dastardly seducer like Pierre Abelard.  I have not a word to say against the misused, faithful girl, and would not withhold from her grave a single one of those simple tributes which blighted youths and maidens offer to her memory, but I am sorry enough that I have not time and opportunity to write four or five volumes of my opinion of her friend the founder of the Parachute, or the Paraclete, or whatever it was.

The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my ignorance!  I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled to any tearful attentions or not.  I wish I had my immortelles back, now, and that bunch of radishes.