Here, toward the end of the eleventh century, Pierre Abelard was an eager pupil of Guillaume de Champeaux; and early in the next century, here and in the gardens of Saint-Geneviève, he was a honey-tongued teacher. He lodged in the house of Canon Fulbert, in whose niece of seventeen—less than half his own age—he found an ardent learner, not alone in theology. Here, on this spot, she taught herself that devotion to the poor-spirited lover who was so bold-spirited a thinker; a devotion, that, outlasting his life by the twenty years of her longer life, found expression in her dying wish, put into verse by Alexander Pope:
"May one kind Grave unite each hapless Name,
And graft my Love immortal on thy Fame."
He died at the Priory of Saint-Marcel near Châlons, whose prior sent the body, at her request, to Héloise, then Abbess of the Convent at Nogent-sur-Seine, and famed as a miracle of erudition and piety. She was buried in the grave she there dug for him, and in 1800, when her convent was destroyed, leaving no stone, the tomb and its contents were removed to the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, and in 1817 they were placed in Père-Lachaise.
We willingly lose sight of Abelard's sorry story in face of his splendid powers. These came into play at a period of mental and spiritual awakening, brought about by unwonted light from all quarters of the sky. Theological questions filled the air; asked, not only by priests and clerks, but by the silly crowd and by wistful children, and by gray-headed men sitting on school benches. The Crusades, failing in material conquest, had won the Holy Land of Eastern Learning; and Constantinople, lost later to the Christian world, gave to it fleeing Greek scholars, carrying precious manuscripts, Byzantine logic and physics, all through Europe. Pious soldiers, coming home with wealth; stay-at-home churchmen, who had amassed riches; royalty, anxious to placate Rome—all these built colleges, founded scholarships, endowed chairs, subsidized teachers.
From the cloisters on the island—the cradle of the University, as the Palace at the other end of the island was the cradle of the Town—from the new cathedral that Abelard had not seen, the schools stepped over to the mainland on the south. There, on the shore, were built the College of the Four Nations, and the School of Medicine, alongside that annex of the old Hôtel-Dieu, which was reached by the little bridge, that went only the other day, and that led from the central structure on the island. From this shore the scholars' quarter spread up the slope to the summit of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève. There teachers and scholars met in the cloisters of the great abbey, that had grown up around the tomb of the patron saint of Paris, where now stands the Panthéon. Of the huge basilica, its foundations laid by Clovis—who had paid for a victory by his baptism into Christianity—there is left the tower, rising, aged and estranged, above the younger structures of the Lycée Henri IV. Its foundations under ground are of Clovis, its lower portion is of eleventh-century rebuilding, its upper portion of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The plan of his cloisters, and some of its stones, are kept in the arches of the college court, to which one enters from No. 23 Rue Clovis. And, in the street named for his wife, Clotilde, you may see the massive side wall of the abbey refectory, now the college chapel.
Around about the southern side of the abbey, and around the schools on the slope below, that were the beginning of the University, Philippe-Auguste threw the protecting arm of his great wall. Within its clasp lay the Pays Latin, wherein that tongue was used exclusively in those schools. This language, sacred to so-called learning and unknown to the vulgar, seemed a fit vehicle for the lame science of the doctor, and the crippled dialectics of the theologian, both always in arms against the "new learning." It was not until the close of Henri IV.'s reign, that it was thought worth while to use the French language in the classes. All through the Middle Ages, this University was a world-centre for its teaching, and through all the ages it has been "that prolific soil in which no seeds, which have once been committed to it, are ever permitted to perish." While la Cité was the seat of a militant Church, and la Ville the gathering-place of thronging merchants, this hill-side swarmed with students, and their officials were put to it to house them properly and keep them orderly. They got on as best they might, ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-clad, often begging, always roistering, in the streets. By day the sedate burghers of the other quarters trembled for their ducats and their daughters, and found peace only when night brought the locking of the gate of the Petit-Châtelet, and the shutting up in their own district of the turbulent students.
Turbulent still, the students of our day, of every land and all tongues—except Latin—stream through the streets of the Latin Quarter, intent on study, or on pleasure bent. Only the Revolution has ever thinned their ranks, what time the Legislative Assembly nearly wrecked the parent University, with all its offspring throughout France. Napoleon rescued them all, and by his legislation of 1806 and 1808, the University has been builded solidly on the foundations of the State. The ancient scholars' quarter, unlighted and undrained and unhealthful, is almost all gone; its narrow, tortuous streets are nearly all widened or wiped out; open spaces and gardens give it larger lungs; its dark, damp, mouldy colleges have made way for grandiose structures of the latest sanitation. Yet the gray walls of the annex of the Hôtel-Dieu still gloom down on the narrow street; the fifteenth-century School of Medicine, its vast hall perverted to base uses, is hidden behind the entrance of No. 15 Rue de la Bucherie; and above the buildings on the west side of Rue de l'Hôtel-Colbert rises the rotunda of its later amphitheatre. Rue Galande retains many of its houses of the time of Charles IX., when these gables on the street were erected. Except for the superb façade at No. 29 Rue de la Parcheminerie—a municipal residence dating from about the middle of the eighteenth century—that venerable street remains absolutely unaltered since its very first days, when the parchment-makers took it for their own. Some of their parchment seems to be still on sale in its shop windows. In the ancient house No. 8 Rue Boutebrie you will find as perfect a specimen of a mediæval staircase, its wooden rail admirably carved, as is left in Paris. And the street of the Mountain of Sainte-Geneviève still winds, stonily steep, up the slope.
