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132 date at Saint Denis. The motion was agreed to, and for an instant Abailard had hope. But the legate was soon persuaded that a postponement would be a virtual admission of weakness. It was represented to him that Abailard's book was condemned by the very fact of his having presumed publicly to lecture upon it without its having been authorised by the Roman pontiff or by the church ; it must therefore be officially consigned to the flames as a warning to others. Bishop Geoffrey made stand no longer. He sorrowfully advised Abailard to yield : this violence, he said, could only recoil on the heads of its authors and assist the cause which it was intended to destroy. The book was burnt and its author was committed to the custody of the abbat of Saint Medard.

Abailard was not long held in confinement. His sentence had become, he says, a public scandal; and his restoration to Saint Denis was less an act of grace than a device for burying the consequences of the trial. But Abailard's second stay in his own monastery was as distasteful to him as the first. His unlucky discovery in the pages of the Venerable Bede that saint Denis, the Areopagite, the patron of the foundation, was bishop of Corinth and not of Athens, as maintained by the tradition of the abbey, brought matters to a crisis. The brethren assembled in chapter, denounced the audacious statement, and threatened its perpetrator with further proceedings before the king. Abailard deemed it wise to flee; he made his way by night into the country of Champagne. But he could not always be a fugitive; he desired in no