ART AND LEARNING AT PARIS
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 13TH CENTURY SCULPTURES FROM ST. DENIS (RESTORED).]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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!
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.]
[Illustration: 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!"
[Illustration: TOWER IN RUE NALETTE IN WHICH CALVIN IS SAID TO HAVE
LIVED.]
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.
[Illustration: 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--
"Che leggendo nel vico degli strami
Sillogizzò invidiosi veri."[71]
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.
[Illustration: 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.