Fulbert was enraged by this.  He ill-treated Heloise, and, furthermore, he forbade Abelard to visit her.  The girl, therefore, again left her uncle’s house and betook herself to a convent just outside of Paris, where she assumed the habit of a nun as a disguise.  There Abelard continued from time to time to meet her.

When Fulbert heard of this he put his own interpretation on it.  He believed that Abelard intended to ignore the marriage altogether, and that possibly he might even marry some other woman.  In any case, he now hated Abelard with all his heart; and he resolved to take a fearful and unnatural vengeance which would at once prevent his enemy from making any other marriage, while at the same time it would debar him from ecclesiastical preferment.

To carry out his plot Fulbert first bribed a man who was the body-servant of Abelard, watching at the door of his room each night.  Then he hired the services of four ruffians.  After Abelard had retired and was deep in slumber the treacherous valet unbarred the door.  The hirelings of Fulbert entered and fell upon the sleeping man.  Three of them bound him fast, while the fourth, with a razor, inflicted on him the most shameful mutilation that is possible.  Then, extinguishing the lights, the wretches slunk away and were lost in darkness, leaving behind their victim bound to his couch, uttering cries of torment and bathed in his own blood.

It is a shocking story, and yet it is intensely characteristic of the lawless and barbarous era in which it happened.  Early the next morning the news flew rapidly through Paris.  The city hummed like a bee-hive.  Citizens and students and ecclesiastics poured into the street and surrounded the house of Abelard.

“Almost the entire city,” says Fulques, as quoted by McCabe, “went clamoring toward his house.  Women wept as if each one had lost her husband.”

Unmanned though he was, Abelard still retained enough of the spirit of his time to seek vengeance.  He, in his turn, employed ruffians whom he set upon the track of those who had assaulted him.  The treacherous valet and one of Fulbert’s hirelings were run down, seized, and mutilated precisely as Abelard had been; and their eyes were blinded.  A third was lodged in prison.  Fulbert himself was accused before one of the Church courts, which alone had power to punish an ecclesiastic, and all his goods were confiscated.

But, meantime, how did it fare with Heloise?  Her grief was greater than his own, while her love and her devotion were absolutely undiminished.  But Abelard now showed a selfishness—­and indeed, a meanness—­far beyond any that he had before exhibited.  Heloise could no more be his wife.  He made it plain that he put no trust in her fidelity.  He was unwilling that she should live in the world while he could not; and so he told her sternly that she must take the veil and bury herself for ever in a nunnery.

The pain and shame which she experienced at this came wholly from the fact that evidently Abelard did not trust her.  Long afterward she wrote: