_Art and Learning at Paris_
Two epoch-making developments--the creation of Gothic architecture and
the rise of the University of Paris--synchronise with the period
covered by the reigns of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, and may now
fitly be considered.
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. 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.
A profound silence reigned, broken only by the murmur of those who
confessed their sins when a halt was made. A trumpet sounded, banners
were unfurled, and the silent host resumed its way. Arrived at the
building the whole multitude burst forth into a song of praise. 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 adequate to the demands of his
time. The old churches of Notre Dame and of St. Stephen[58] and many
houses were demolished, and a new street, called of 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 of the new Notre Dame, and in 1163
Pope Alexander III. is said to have laid the first stone. In 1182, the
choir being finished, the papal legate, Henri de Chateaux-Marcay,
consecrated the high altar, and in 1185 the Patriarch of Jerusalem
celebrated mass in the choir. At Sully's death, in 1196, the walls of
the nave were erect and partly roofed, and the old prelate left a
hundred livres for a covering of lead. The transepts and nave were
completed in 1235.
[Footnote 58: The relics were transferred to a new church of St.
Stephen (St. Etienne du Mont), built by the abbot of St. Genevieve as
a parish church for his servants and tenants.]
In 1240 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, and choir and apse were now rebuilt
in the new style, to harmonise with the remainder of the church. By
the end of the thirteenth century the chapels round the apse and in
the nave, the Porte Rouge and the south portal were added, and the
great temple was at length completed. The choir of St. Germain des
Pres and the exquisite little church of St. Julien le Pauvre were
rebuilt 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.[59] 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 mediaeval colour and gold. During the
Revolution it was used as a 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--_Propriete nationale a
vendre_. 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.
[Footnote 59: The early glass-workers were particularly fond of their
beautiful red. "Wine of the colour of the windows of the Sainte
Chapelle," was a popular locution of the time.]
Gothic architecture was eminently a product of the Isle de France.
"France not only _led_," says Mr. Lethaby, "but _invented_. In a very
true sense what we call Gothic is Frenchness of the France which had
its centre in Paris." 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, a variety, and 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
Gaul by the Phoenician trade route, and the Merovingian Franks were
always in touch with the Eastern Mediterranean, and with the stream of
early Byzantine[60] art. 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 early thirteenth-century statues
on the west front of Chartres Cathedral are carved with a naturalness
and grace which the Italian masters never surpassed, and the
marvellously mature and beautiful 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 Francais 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
of the names of those who created these wonderful productions few are
known; the great masterpieces of the thirteenth century are mostly
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." He was followed
by Pierre de Montereau, "master of the works of the church of Blessed
Mary at Paris," whose name thus appears in a deed of sale dated 1265.
The Sainte Chapelle is commonly attributed to Pierre de Montereau, but
the attribution is a mere guess.
[Footnote 60: The researches of Professor Strzygowski of Gratz, and
other authorities in the field of Byzantine and Eastern archaeology,
tend to prove the dominant importance of the Christian East in the
development of early ecclesiastical architecture and the subordinate
influence of Roman models.]
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, the very crest of the roof,
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 like Aaron's breastplate, 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. "People," said William Morris, "have long
since ceased to take in impressions through their eyes," indeed 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.
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[62] 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 Pres
was known as St. Germain _le dore_ (the golden), from its glowing
refulgence, and St. Bernard as we have seen, 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.[63]
[Footnote 61: Brunetto Latini, in the thirteenth century contrasted
the high towers and grim stone walls of the fortress-palaces of the
Italian nobles with the large, spacious and painted houses of the
French, their rooms adorned _pour avoir joie et delit_ and surrounded
with orchards and gardens.]
[Footnote 62: Par. XVI. 51.]
[Footnote 63: Another delusion of moderns is that there was an absence
of personal cleanliness in those ages. In the census of the
inhabitants of Paris, who in 1292 were subject to the Taille, there
are inscribed the names of no less than twenty-six proprietors of
public hot baths, a larger proportion to population than exists
to-day, and Dr. Gasquet has described in his _English Monastic Life_
the admirable provisions for personal cleanliness made in mediaeval
monasteries.]
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_,[64] the famous _Scola Parisiaca_, referred
to by Abelard; of St. Genevieve; and of St. Victor, founded by William
of Champeaux, one of the most successful masters of Notre Dame. 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 sublety
he soon eclipsed his master's fame and was appointed to a chair of
philosophy in the school of Notre Dame. William, 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.
[Footnote 64: Hence the name of _clerc_ applied to any student, even
if a layman.]
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, Heloise 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: Heloise seventeen. _Amor al cor gentil ratto s'apprende_,[65]
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; Heloise 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. Heloise, that the master's advancement in the Church
might not be impeded, 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 Heloise 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.
[Footnote 65: "Love is quickly caught in gentle heart."--Inf. V. 100.]
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 Heloise 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, and 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;
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 Heloise, 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 Pere-la-Chaise Cemetery at
Paris which marks the last resting-place of Abelard and Heloise, 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 Felibien, 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 mediaeval Paris: William of Champeaux,
Peter Lombard, Maurice de Sully, Pierre de Chartreux, Abelard,
Gilbert[66] l'Universel, Adrian IV., St. Thomas of Canterbury, and his
biographer John of Salisbury. Small wonder that the youth of the
twelfth century sought the springs of learning at Paris!
[Footnote 66: Afterwards bishop of London.]
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.]
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,
and whose _clientele_ 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 and 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 Francois 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.[67] In 1171 a London merchant (Jocius de
Londonne), passing through Paris on his return from the Holy Land,
touched by the sight of some starving students begging their bread,
founded a hostel for eighteen poor scholars at the Hotel Dieu, who in
return for lodging and maintenance were to perform the last Christian
rites to the friendless dead. This, known as the college of the
Dix-huit, was 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[68] a modest college of theology, and obtained from Blanche of
Castile a small house above the palace of the Thermae where he was able
to maintain a few poor students of theology. 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 became the great court of appeal in the Middle
Ages in matters of theology, and the Sorbonne 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 bursaries 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."
[Footnote 67: The two churches still existed in the eighteenth century
and stood on the site of the southern Cours Visconti and Lefuel of the
present Louvre.]
[Footnote 68: The actual originator was, however, the queen's
physician, Robert de Douai, who left a sum of money which formed the
nucleus of the foundation.]
In 1304, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, left her mansion
near the Tour de Nesle and 2000 livres annually to found the college
of Navarre for seventy poor scholars, twenty in grammar, thirty in
philosophy, and twenty in theology. The first were allowed four sous
weekly; the second, six; the third, eight. If any were possessed of
annual incomes respectively of thirty, forty and sixty livres, they
ceased to hold bursaries. The maintenance fund seems, however, to have
been 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 Felibien'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 Montaigu, founded in
1314 by Archbishop Gilles de Montaigu, housed eighty-two poor scholars
in memory of the twelve apostles and seventy disciples. There the rod
was never spared to the _faineant_; the discipline so severe, 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_[69] of
them. This was the _College de Pouillerye_ denounced by Rabelais and
notorious to students as the _College des Haricots_, because they were
fed there chiefly on beans. Erasmus was a poor _boursier_ there,
disgusted at its mean fare and squalor, and Calvin, known as the
"accusative," from his austere piety. Desmoulins, the inaugurator of
the Revolution, and St. Just, its fiery and immaculate apostle, sat on
its benches. 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.
[Footnote 69: The Montaigu scholars were called _capetes_ from their
peculiar _cape fermee_, or cloak, such as Masters of Arts used to
wear. The Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve occupies the site of the
college.]
[Illustration: TOWER IN RUE VALETTE IN WHICH CALVIN IS SAID TO HAVE
LIVED.]
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.
Each group elected its own officers, and in 1245 at latest the _Quatre
Nations_ were meeting in the church of St. Julien le Pauvre 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.
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 _cures_
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.
The famous Petit Pre aux Clercs (Clerks' Meadow) was the theatre of
many a fight with the powerful abbots of St. Germain des Pres.[70]
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, Abbot Gerard 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.
In 1345 another bloody fight took place between the monks and the
scholars over the right to fish there.
[Footnote 70: There were two Pres, the Petit Pre roughly represented
by the area now enclosed by the Rues de Seine, Jacob and Bonaparte;
and the Grand Pre which extended nearly to the Champ de Mars. A narrow
stream, the Petite Seine, divided them.]
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 (_Treve 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.
The French jurists were famed for their supreme excellence all over
Western Europe. In the thirteenth century Brunette Latini wrote his
most famous work, the _Livres dou Tresor_, in French, because it was
_la parleure plus delitable, il plus commune a 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--
"Che leggendo nel vico degli strami
Sillogizzo invidiosi veri."[71]
[Footnote 71: Par. X. 136. "Who lecturing in Straw St. deduced truths
that brought him hatred."]
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 hostel for scholars or a school. It was in the Rue du Fouarre
that Pantagruel "held dispute against all the regents, professors of
arts and orators and did so gallantly that he overthrew them all and
set them all upon their tails." The street 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.
[Footnote 72: Benvenuto was certainly in France and possibly in Paris
during the fourteenth century. At any rate he would be familiar with
Parisian students, many of whom were Italians.]
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 of Paris 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 joy 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
enlighted and ignorance banished and Jesus Christ gives to His spouse
an eloquence which confounds all her enemies."
But decadence soon ensued. 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,
scholars in attendance and 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 of Paris. 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.
In the general decay, however, the Jesuit College of Clermont, known
later as of Louis le Grand, stood forth renowned and exuberant. During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the erudition of its
teachers, their excellent method and admirable discipline, made it the
premier college of Paris and in the heyday of its fame five hundred
scholars crowded its halls, among them the scions of the nobility of
France. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the university had
its seat in the college and concentrated there the endowments, or such
as had escaped spoliation, of twenty-six suppressed colleges. The
college of Louis le Grand and nine others of the multitude that
clustered around the hill of St. Genevieve, were all that survived
when the Revolution burst forth, and it is not without interest to
note that on 19th June 1781, the central body sitting at the famous
Jesuit college unanimously awarded a prize of six hundred livres to a
poor young _boursier_ of the college of Arras, named Louis Francois
Maximilian Marie Robespierre, for twelve years of exemplary conduct
and of success in examinations and competitions.
Before we close this chapter a word of acknowledgment is due to the
mediaeval church in Paris for her careful fostering of elementary
education. By the Taille of 1292 already referred to, we learn that
schools for children of both sexes were distributed nearly over the
whole of the city radiating from the mother church of Notre Dame. At
the beginning of the fifteenth century twenty-one parishes had one or
two of these schools; in 1449 a thousand schoolboys took part in a
procession to Notre Dame to render thanks for the recovery of
Normandy. The Church inspected the sanitary condition of the schools
and exacted a standard of proficiency for the qualification of masters
and mistresses.