TWO epoch-making developments—the creation of Gothic architecture and the rise of the university—synchronise with the period covered by the reigns of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, and may now fitly be considered.

CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS.
CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS.

The memory of the Norman terror had long passed from men’s minds. The Isle de France had been purged of robber lords, and with peace and security, wealth and population had increased. The existing churches were becoming too small for the faithful and new and fairer temples replaced the old: the massive square towers, the heavy walls and thick pillars of the Norman builders blossomed into grace and light and beauty. Already in the beginning of the twelfth century the church of St. Denis was in urgent need of extension. On festival days so great were the crowds pressing to view the relics that many people had been trodden under foot, and Abbot Suger determined to build a larger and nobler church. St. Denis is an edifice of profound interest to the traveller. In the west faÇade (1140) we may see the round Norman arch side by side with the pointed Gothic, and the choir completed in 1144 was the earliest example of a Gothic apse. But Suger’s structure was nearly destroyed by fire in 1219, and the upper part of the choir, the nave and transepts, were rebuilt in 1231 in the pure Gothic of the time. Great was the enthusiasm of the people as the new temple rose. Noble and burgess, freeman and serf, harnessed themselves like beasts of burden to the ropes and drew the stone from the quarry. All would lend their aid in raising the new house of God and of His holy martyrs, and the burial-place of their kings. In 1161 Maurice de Sully, a peasant’s son, who had risen to become bishop of Paris, determined to erect a great minster in the place of Childebert’s basilica, which was no longer adequate to the demands of the time. The old church of St. Stephen[59] and many houses were demolished together with the cathedral, and a new street, called Notre Dame, was made. Sully devoted the greater part of his life and private resources to the work. The king, the pope, seigneurs, guilds of merchants and private persons, vied with each other in making gifts. Two years were spent in digging the foundations, and in 1163 Pope Alexander III. is said to have laid the first stone. In 1182, the choir being finished, the papal legate consecrated the high altar. At Sully’s death, in 1196, the walls of the nave were erect and partly roofed. The transepts and nave were completed in 1235.

NOTRE DAME: PORTAL OF ST. ANNE.
NOTRE DAME: PORTAL OF ST. ANNE.

In 1218 an ingenious and sacrilegious thief, climbing to the roof to haul up the silver candlesticks from the altar by a noose in a rope, set fire to the altar cloth, and the choir was seriously injured. Sully’s work had been Romanesque in style, and choir and apse were now rebuilt in the new style, to harmonise with the remainder of the church. The builders have preserved some of the best of the Romanesque twelfth-century work in the portal of St. Anne’s, under the south tower, and the magnificent iron hinges of old St. Stephen’s were used for its doors. The chapels round the apse and the twenty-eight figures of the royal benefactors from Childebert I. to Philip Augustus, on the west front, were not completed until the end of the thirteenth century. The choir of St. Germain des PrÉs and the exquisite little church of St. Julien le Pauvre were built at the end of the twelfth century, and the beautiful refectory of St. Martin des Champs was created about 1220. But the culmination of Gothic art is reached in the wondrous sanctuary that St. Louis built for the crown of thorns, “the most precious piece of Gothic,” says Ruskin, “in Northern Europe.” Michelet saw a whole world of religion and poetry—tears of piety, mystic ecstasy, the mysteries of divine love—expressed in the marvellous little church, in the fragile and precious paintings of its windows.[60] The narrow cell with an aperture looking on the reliquary, which St. Louis used as an oratory, is still shown. The work was completed in three years, and has been so admirably restored by Viollet-le-Duc that the visitor may gaze to-day on this pure and peerless gem almost as St. Louis left it, for the gorgeous interior faithfully reproduces the mediÆval colour and gold. During the Revolution it was used as an granary and then as a club. It narrowly escaped destruction, and men now living can remember seeing the old notices on the porch of the lower chapel—PropriÉtÉ nationale À vendre. Only once a year, when the “red mass” is said at the opening of the Law Courts in November, is the church used; and all that remains of the relics has long been transferred to the treasury of Notre Dame. The old Quinze-Vingts, the Chartreux, the Cordeliers, St. Croix de la Bretonnerie, St. Catherine, the Blancs Manteaux, the Mathurins and other masterpieces of the Gothic builders have all disappeared.

Gothic architecture was eminently a product of the Isle de France. The thirteenth century rivals the finest period of Greek art for purity, simplicity, nobility and accurate science of construction. Imagination was chastened by knowledge, but not systematised into rigid rules. Each master solved his problem in his own way, and the result was a charm and a variety, a fertility of invention, never surpassed in the history of art. Early French sculpture is a direct descendant of Greek art, which made its way into France by the Phoenician trade route. French artists achieved a perfection in the representation of the human form which anticipated by a generation the work of the Pisani in Italy, for the statues on the west front of Chartres Cathedral (1150-1160) are carved with a naturalness and grace which the Italian masters never surpassed, and the marvellously mature and beautiful thirteenth-century silver-gilt figure of a king, in high relief, found in 1902 immured in an old house at Bourges and exhibited in 1904 among the Primitifs FranÇais at the Louvre, was wrought more than a century before the birth of Donatello. Some fragments of the old sculptures that adorned St. Denis and other twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches may still be found in the museums of Paris. The influence of the French architects, as Emile Bertaux has demonstrated in the first volume of his Art dans l’Italie Meridionale, extended far beyond the limits of France, and is clearly traceable in the fine hunting-palace, erected for Frederic II. in the thirteenth century, at Castello del Monte, near Andria, in Apulia. But the names of those who created these wonderful productions no man knoweth; the great masterpieces of the thirteenth century are anonymous. Jean de Chelles, one of the masons of Notre Dame, has left his name on the south portal and the date, Feb. 12, 1257, on which it was begun, “in honour of the holy Mother of Christ,” but nothing is known of him. The Sainte-Chapelle is commonly attributed to Pierre de Montereau, but the attribution is a mere guess.

13th Century Sculptures from St. Denis (Restored).
13th Century Sculptures from St. Denis (Restored).

NOTRE DAME—SOUTHERN SIDE.
NOTRE DAME—SOUTHERN SIDE.

Nor did the love of beauty during this marvellous age express itself solely in architecture. If we were asked to specify one trait which more than any other characterises the “dark ages” and differentiates them from modern times, we should be tempted to say, love of brightness and colour. Within and without, the temples of God were resplendent with silver and gold, with purple and crimson and blue; the saintly figures and solemn legends on their porches, the capitals, the columns, the groins of the vaultings were lustrous with colour and gold. Each window was a complex of jewelled splendour: the pillars and walls were painted or draped with lovely tapestries and gorgeous banners: the shrines and altars glittered with precious stones—jasper and sardius and chalcedony, sapphire and emerald, chrysolite and beryl, topaz and amethyst and pearl. The Church illuminated her sacred books with exquisite painting, bound them with precious fabrics, and clasped them with silver and gold; the robes of her priests and ministrants were rich with embroideries. So insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him and he averts his gaze.

La Sainte Chapelle.
La Sainte Chapelle.

Nor were the churches of those early times anything more than an exquisite expression of what men were surrounded by in their daily lives and avocations. The houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a shoemaker. Astronomy and grammar were arts: so was spinning. Apothecaries and lawyers were artists: so was a tailor. Dante uses the word artista as denoting a workman or craftsman, and when he wishes to emphasise the degeneracy of the citizens of his time as compared with those of the old Florentine race, he does so by saying that in those days their blood ran pure even nell’ ultimo artista (in the commonest workman). Let us be careful how we speak of these ages as “dark”; at least there were “retrievements out of the night.” Already before the tenth century the basilica of St. Germain des PrÉs was known as St. Germain le dorÉ (the golden), from its glowing refulgence, and St. Bernard declaimed against the resplendent colour and gold in the churches of his time. Never since the age of Pericles has so great an effusion of beauty descended on the earth as during the wondrous thirteenth century in the Isle de France and especially in Paris.[62]

We pass from the enthusiasm of art to that of learning. From earliest times, schools, free to the poor, had been attached to every great abbey and cathedral in France. At the end of the eleventh century four were eminent at Paris: the schools of St. Denis, where the young princes and nobles were educated; of the Parvis Notre Dame, for the training of young clercs,[63] the famous Scola Parisiaca, referred to by Abelard; of St. Genevieve; and of St. Victor, founded by William of Champeaux. The fame of this teacher drew multitudes of young men from the provinces to Paris, among whom there came, about 1100, Peter Abelard, scion of a noble family of Nantes. By his wit, erudition and dialectical subtlety he soon eclipsed his master’s fame and was appointed to a chair of philosophy in the school of Notre Dame. William of Champeaux, jealous of his young rival, compassed his dismissal, and after teaching for a while at Melun, Abelard returned to Paris and opened a school on Mont St. Genevieve, whither crowds of students followed him. So great was the fame of this brilliant lecturer and daring thinker that his school was filled with eager listeners from all countries of Europe, even from Rome herself.

Abelard was proud and ambitious, and the highest prizes of an ecclesiastical and scholastic career seemed within his grasp. But Fulbert, canon of Notre Dame, had a niece, accomplished and passing fair, HÉloÏse by name, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the great teacher. It was proposed that Abelard should enter the canon’s house as her tutor, and Fulbert’s avarice made the proposition an acceptable one. Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue, a facile master of versi d’amore, which he would sing with a voice wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age: HÉloÏse seventeen. Amor al cor gentil ratio s’apprende,[64] and Minerva was not the only goddess who presided over their meetings. For a time Fulbert was blind, but scandal cleared his eyes and Abelard was expelled from the house. HÉloÏse followed and took refuge with her lover’s sister in Brittany, where a child, Astrolabe, was born. Peacemakers soon intervened and a secret marriage was arranged, which took place early one morning at Paris, Fulbert being present. But the lovers continued to meet; scandal was again busy and Fulbert published the marriage. HÉloÏse, that the master’s advancement in the Church might not be marred, gave the lie to her uncle and fled to the nuns of Argenteuil. Fulbert now plotted a dastardly revenge. By his orders Abelard was surprised in his bed, and the mutilation which, according to Eusebius, Origen performed on himself, was violently inflicted on the great teacher. All ecclesiastical preferment was thus rendered canonically impossible: Abelard became the talk of Paris, and in bitter humiliation retired to the abbey of St. Denis. Before he made his vows, however, he required of HÉloÏse that she should take the veil. The heart-broken creature reproached him for his disloyalty, and repeating the lines which Lucan puts into the mouth of Cornelia weeping for Pompey’s death, burst into tears and consented to take the veil.

A savage punishment was inflicted by the ecclesiastical courts on Fulbert’s ruffians, who were made to suffer the lex talionis and the loss of their eyes: the canon’s property was confiscated. The great master, although forbidden to open a school at St. Denis, was importuned by crowds of young men not to let his talents waste, and soon a country house near by was filled with so great a company of scholars that food could not be found for them. But enemies were vigilant and relentless, and he had shocked the timid by doubting the truth of the legend that Dionysius the Areopagite had come to France.

In 1124 certain of Abelard’s writings on the Trinity were condemned, and he took refuge at Nogent-sur-Seine, near Troyes, under the patronage of the Count of Champagne. He retired to a hermitage of thatch and reeds, the famous Paraclete, but even there students flocked to him, and young nobles were glad to live on coarse bread and lie on straw, that they might taste of wisdom, the bread of the angels. Again his enemies set upon him. He surrendered the Paraclete to HÉloÏse and a small sisterhood, and accepted the abbotship of St. Gildes in his own Brittany. A decade passed, and again he was seen in Paris. His enemies now determined to silence him. St. Bernard, the dictator of Christendom, denounced his writings. Abelard appealed for a hearing, and the two champions met in St. Stephen’s church at Sens before the king, the hierarchy and a brilliant and expectant audience. Abelard, the ever-victorious knight-errant of disputation, stood forth, eager for the fray, but St. Bernard simply rose and read out seventeen propositions from his opponent’s works, which he declared to be heretical. Abelard in disgust left the lists, and was condemned unheard to perpetual silence. The pope, to whom he appealed, confirmed the sentence, and the weary soldier of the mind, old and heart-broken, retired to Cluny. He gave up the struggle, was reconciled to his opponents, and died absolved by the pope near Chalons in 1142. His ashes were sent to HÉloÏse, and twenty years later she was laid beside him at the Paraclete. A well-known path, worn by generations of unhappy lovers, leads to a monument in PÈre-la-Chaise Cemetery at Paris which marks the last resting-place of Abelard and HÉloÏse, whose remains were transferred there in 1817.

It is commonly believed that Abelard’s school on Mont St. Genevieve was the origin of the Latin Quarter in Paris, but the migration to the south had probably begun before Abelard came, and was rather due to the overcrowding of the episcopal schools. Teachers and scholars began to swarm to the new quarter over the bridge where quiet, purer air and better accommodation were found. Ordinances of Bishop Gilbert, 1116, and Stephen, 1124, transcribed by FÉlibien, make this clear. So disturbed were the canons by the numbers of students in the cloister, that externes were to be no longer admitted, nor other schools allowed on the north side where the canons lodged. The growing importance of the new schools, which tended to the advantage of the abbey of St. Genevieve, soon alarmed the bishops, and the theologians were ordered to lecture only between the two bridges (the Petit and Grand Ponts.) But it was Abelard’s brilliant career that attracted like a lodestar the youth of Europe to Paris, and made that city the “oven where the intellectual bread of the world was baked.” Providence, it was said, had given Empire to Germany, Priestcraft to Italy, Learning to France. What a constellation of great names glows in the spiritual firmament of Paris: William of Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Maurice de Sully, Pierre de Chartreux, Abelard, Gilbert[65] l’Universel, John of Salisbury, Adrian IV., St. Thomas of Canterbury. Small wonder that the youth of the twelfth century sought the springs of learning at Paris!

NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.
NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.

The Seine from Pont de la Concorde.
The Seine from Pont de la Concorde.

There was no discipline or college life among the earliest students. Each master, having obtained his license from the bishop’s chancellor, rented a room at his own cost, and taught what he knew—even, it was sometimes complained, what he did not know. We read of one Adam du Petit Pont, who, in the twelfth century, expounded Aristotle in the back-room of a house on the bridge amid the cackle of cocks and hens, whose clientÈle had many a vituperative contest with the fish-fags of the neighbourhood. The students grouped themselves according to nationalities, and with their masters held meetings in any available cloister, refectory, or church. When funds were needed, a general levy was made; any balance that remained was spent in a festive gathering in the nearest tavern. The aggregation of thousands of young men, some of whom were cosmopolitan vagabonds, gave rise to many evils. Complaints are frequent among the citizens of the depredations and immoralities of riotous clercs, who lived by their wits or by their nimble fingers, or by reciting or singing licentious ballads: the paouvres escolliers, whose miserable estate, temptations, debauchery, ignoble pleasures, remorse and degradation have been so pathetically sung by FranÇois Villon, master of arts, poet, bohemian, burglar and homicide. The richer scholars often indulged in excesses, and of the vast majority who were poor, some died of hunger. It was the spectacle of half-starving clercs begging for bread that evoked the compassion of pious founders of colleges, which originally were simply hostels for needy scholars. On the return of Louis VII. from a pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, his brother Robert founded about 1180 the church of St. Thomas of Canterbury and a hostel for fifteen students, who, in 1217, were endowed with a chapel of their own, dedicated to St. Nicholas, and were then known as the poor scholars of St. Nicholas.[66] In the same year a London merchant, passing through Paris on his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was touched by the sight of some starving students begging their bread. He founded a hostel for eighteen poor scholars at the HÔtel Dieu, who in return for lodging and maintenance were to perform the last Christian rites to the friendless dead. This was the college of the Dix-huit, afterwards absorbed in the Sorbonne. In 1200 Etienne Belot and his wife, burgesses of Paris, founded a hostel for thirteen poor scholars who were known as the bons enfants. In all, some dozen colleges were in being when St. Louis came to the throne. In 1253, St. Louis’ almoner, Robert of Cerbon or Sorbon, a poor Picardy village, founded[67] a modest college of theology, and obtained from Blanche of Castile a small house above the palace of the ThermÆ. Here he was able to maintain a few poor scholars of theology and to facilitate their studies. Friends came to his aid and soon sixteen were accommodated, to whom others, able to maintain themselves, were added. In 1269 a papal bull confirmed the establishment of the pauvres maistres estudiants in the faculty of theology at Paris. Even when enriched by later founders it was still called la pauvre Sorbonne. By the renown of their erudition, the doctors of the Sorbonne were the great court of appeal in the Middle Ages in matters of theology, and the Sorbonne became synonymous with the university. Some of the hostels were on a larger scale. The college of Cardinal Lemoine, founded in 1302 by the papal legate, housed sixty students in arts and forty in theology. Most were paying residents, but a number of bourses (scholarships) were provided for those whose incomes were below a certain amount. Each boursier was given daily two loaves of white bread of twelve ounces, “the common weight in the windows of Paris bakers.”

In 1304, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, founded the college of Navarre for seventy poor scholars, twenty in grammar, thirty in philosophy, and twenty in theology. The maintenance fund seems, however, to have been inadequate or mismanaged, for we soon read of the scholars of the college walking the streets of Paris every morning crying—“Bread, bread, good people, for the poor scholars of Madame of Navarre!”

Some forty colleges were in existence by the end of the fourteenth century and had increased to fifty by the end of the fifteenth; in the seventeenth, Evelyn gives their number as sixty-five. In FÉlibien’s time some had disappeared, for in his map (1725) forty-four colleges only are marked. Nearly the whole of these colleges clustered around the slopes of Mont St. Genevieve, which at length became that Christian Athens that Charlemagne dreamt of. Each college had its own rules. Generally students were required to attend matins (in summer at 3 a.m., winter at 4), mass, vespers and compline. When the curfew of Notre Dame sounded, they retired to their dormitories. Leave to sleep out was granted only in very exceptional cases. Tennis was allowed, cards and dice were forbidden. The college of Montaigue, which housed eighty-two poor scholars in memory of the twelve apostles and seventy disciples, was reformed in the fifteenth century; so severe was the discipline that the college became the terror of the youth of Paris, and fathers were wont to sober their libertine sons by threatening to make capetes[68] of them. This was Calvin’s college, where he was known as the “accusative,” from his austere piety. To obtain admission to the college of Cluny (1269) the scholar must pass an entrance examination. He then spent two years at logic, three at metaphysics, two in Biblical studies; he held weekly disputations and preached every fortnight in French; he was interrogated every evening by the president on his studies during the day. If students evinced no aptitude for learning they were dismissed; if only moderate progress were made, the secular duties of the college devolved upon them. It was the foundation of these colleges which organised themselves, about 1200, into powerful corporations of masters and scholars (universitates magistrorum et scholiarum) that gave the university its definite character.

When the term “university” first came into use is unknown. It is met with in the statutes (1215) which, among other matters, define the limits of age for teaching. A master in the arts must not lecture under twenty-one; of theology under thirty-five. Every master must undergo an examination as to qualification and moral fitness at the Episcopal Chancellor’s court. Early in the twelfth century the four faculties of Law, Medicine, Arts and Theology were formed and the national groups reduced to four: French, Picards, Normans and English.[69] Each group elected its own officers, and in 1245 at latest the Quatre Nations were meeting in the church of St. Julien le Pauvre[70] to choose a common head or rector, who soon superseded the chancellor as head of the university. The rectors in process of time exercised almost sovereign authority in the Latin Quarter. They ruled a population of ten thousand masters and students, who were exempt from civic jurisdiction. In 1200 some German students ill-treated an innkeeper who had insulted their servant. The provost of Paris and some armed citizens attacked the students’ houses and blood was shed, whereupon the masters of the schools complained to the king, who was fierce in his anger, and ordered the provost and his accomplices to be cast into prison, their houses demolished and vines uprooted. The provost was given the choice of imprisonment for life or the ordeal by water. Then followed a series of ordinances which abolished secular jurisdiction over the students and made them subject to ecclesiastical courts alone.

HÔTEL OF THE PROVOST OF PARIS.
HÔTEL OF THE PROVOST OF PARIS.

In the reign of Philip le Bel a provost of Paris dared to hang a scholar. The rector immediately closed all classes until reparation was made, and on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin the curÉs of Paris assembled and went in procession, bearing a cross and holy water to the provost’s house, against which each cast a stone, crying, in a loud voice—“Make honourable reparation, thou cursed Satan, to thy mother Holy Church, whose privileges thou hast injured, or suffer the fate of Dathan and Abiram.” The king dismissed his provost, caused ample compensation to be made, and the schools were reopened.

In 1404 some pages belonging to the royal chamberlain brutally spurred their horses through a procession of scholars wending to the church of St. Catherine. They were stoned by the angry scholars, whereupon they drew sword and attacked them, pursuing them even into the church. The rector demanded satisfaction, but the chamberlain, Charles de Savoisy, was a court functionary, and nothing was done. The rector then closed all the schools and the king ordered the Parlement to do instant justice. The sentence was an exemplary one. The chamberlain’s house was to be demolished, an annuity of one hundred livres to be paid for the maintenance of five chaplaincies under the patronage of the university, a thousand livres compensation to be paid to the injured scholars and a like sum to the university. Three of the chamberlain’s men were to do penance in their shirts, torch in hand, before the churches of St. Genevieve, St. Catherine and St. SÉvÉrin, to suffer a whipping at the cross roads, and to be banished for three years. In 1406 permission was given for the house to be rebuilt, but the university resisted the decree and only gave way one hundred and twelve years later, on condition that the terms of the original condemnation and sentence were inscribed on the new house.

The famous PrÉs aux Clercs (Clerks’ Meadow) was the theatre of many a fight with the powerful abbots of St. Germain des PrÉs. From earliest times the students had been wont to take the air in the meadow, which lay between the monastery and the river, and soon claimed the privilege as an acquired right. In 1192 the inhabitants of the monastic suburb resented their insolence, and a free fight ensued, in which several scholars were wounded and one was killed. The rector inculpated the abbot, and each appealed to Rome, with what result is unknown. After nearly a century of strained relations and minor troubles the abbots in 1278 had walls and other buildings erected on the way to the meadow. The scholars met in force and demolished them. The abbot, who was equal to the occasion, rang his bells, called his vassals to arms and sent a force to seize the gates of the city that gave on the suburb, to prevent reinforcements reaching the scholars. His retainers then attacked the rioters, killed several and wounded many. The rector complained to the papal legate and threatened to close the schools if reparation were not made and justice done within fifteen days, whereupon the legate ordered the provost of the monastery to be expelled for five years. The royal council forced the abbot to exile ten of his vassals, to endow two chantries for the repose of the souls of slain clercs and compensate their fathers by fines of two hundred and four hundred livres respectively, and to pay the rector two hundred livres to be distributed among poor scholars.

The rector claimed right of jurisdiction over the parchments exposed for sale in Paris and its neighbourhood, and attended with his sworn experts the great Fair of Landry at St. Denis, instituted in 877. The students accompanied him with much uproar. At this season the Landry gifts were made by the students to the masters, consisting of a lemon larded with pieces of gold or silver in a crystal glass. The ceremony was accompanied by the sound of drums and musical instruments and was followed by a holiday. Innumerable were the complaints on this and other occasions of the rowdyism of the scholars, their practical jokes and dissolute habits.

Many circumstances contributed to make Paris the capital of the intellectual world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. France has ever been the home of great enthusiasms and has not feared “to follow where airy voices lead.” The conception and enforcement of a Truce of God (TrÈve de Dieu) whereby all acts of hostility in private or public wars ceased during certain days of the week or on church festivals; the noble ideal of Christian chivalry; the first crusade—all had their origin in France. The crusaders carried the prestige of the French name and diffused the French idiom over Europe. It was a French monk preaching in France who gave voice to the general enthusiasm; a French pope approved his impassioned oration; a French shout “Dieu le veut” became the crusader’s war-cry. The conquest of the Holy Land was organised by the French, its first Christian king was a French knight, its laws were indited in French, and to this day every Christian in the East is a Frank whatever tongue he may speak. In the thirteenth century Brunetto Latini wrote his most famous work, the Livres dou TrÉsor, in French, because it was la parleure plus delitable, il plus commune À toutes gens (“the most delightful of languages and the most common to all peoples.”) Martin da Canale composed his story of Venice in French for the same reason, and Marco Polo dictated his travels in French in a Genoese prison. When St. Francis was sending the brothers to establish the order in distant lands, he himself chose France, but was dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin. “When inebriated with love and compassion for Christ,” says the writer of the Speculum, “and overflowing with sweetest melody of the Spirit, ofttimes would he find utterance in the French tongue; the strains of the divine whisperings which his ear had caught he would express in a French song of joyous exultation, and making the gestures of one playing a viol, he would sing in French of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Never in the history of civilisation were men possessed with such passion for the spiritual life or such faith in the reasoning faculty as in the thirteenth century in Paris. The holiest mysteries were analysed and defined; everywhere was a search for new things. Conservative Churchmen became alarmed and complained of disputants and blasphemers exercising their wits at every street corner. The four camel-loads of manuscripts, the works and commentaries of Aristotle, brought by the Jews from Spain—a monstrous and mutilated version translated from Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin—became the battle-ground of the schools. The Church at first forbade the study of Aristotle, then by the genius of Aquinas, Christianised and absorbed him. His works became a kind of intellectual tennis-ball bandied between the Averroists, who carried their teachings to a logical consequence, and the more orthodox followers of Aquinas. For three years the faculty was torn asunder by the rival factions. Siger of Brabant, whose eternal light Dante saw refulgent amid other doctors of the Church in the heaven of the Sun, was an Averroist; Siger—

The Rue du Fouarre (Straw), where Siger taught and perhaps Dante studied, was the street of the Masters of the Arts. Every house in it was a school. It still exists, though wholly modernised, opposite the foot of the Petit Pont. Its name has been derived from the straw spread on the floor of the schools or on which the students sat, but there is little doubt that Benvenuto da Imola’s[72] explanation, that it was so named from a hay and straw market held there, is the correct one.

Le Petit Pont.
Le Petit Pont.

The wonderful thirteenth century saw the meridian glory of the university. It was the age of the great Aristotelian schoolmen who all taught at Paris—Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon, their candid critic, who carried the intellectual curiosity of the age beyond the tolerance of his Franciscan superiors and twice suffered disciplinary measures at Paris.

In the fourteenth century the university was as renowned as ever. Among many tributes from great scholars we choose that of Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham, who in his Philobiblon writes: “O Holy God of gods in Zion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the Paradise of the world, and to linger there; where the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our love! There are delightful libraries more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are luxuriant parks of all manners of volumes; there are Academic meads shaken by the tramp of scholars; there are lounges of Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers; there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus collected in Phoenician letters; there indeed opening our treasures and unfastening our purse-strings we scattered money with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with mud and sand.”

In 1349 the number of professors (maistres-regents) on the rolls was 502: in 1403 they had increased to 709, to which must be added more than 200 masters of theology and canon law. “The University,” wrote Pope Alexander IV. in a papal bull, “is to the Church what the tree of life was to the earthly Paradise, a fruitful source of all learning, diffusing its wisdom over the whole universe; there the mind is enlightened and ignorance banished and Jesus Christ gives to His spouse an eloquence which confounds all her enemies.”

But already decadence had set in. The multiplication and enrichment of colleges proved fatal to the old democratic vigour and equality. Some colleges pretended to superiority and the movement lost its unity. Scholasticism had done its work and no new movement took its place. Teachers lost all originality and did but ruminate and comment on the works of their great predecessors. Schools declined in numbers and scholars in attendance. Ordinances were needed to correct the abuses covered by the title of scholar. The Jacobin and Cordelier teachers, moreover, had exhausted much life from the university; but its fame continued, and Luther in his early conflicts with the papacy appealed against the pope to the university. But it made the fatal blunder of opposing the Reform and the Renaissance, instead of absorbing them, and the interest of those great movements centres around the college of France.