The
Paris of Abelard's time was astonishingly old; so old that hardly
a stone of it can be now pointed out. Even the oldest of the buildings
still standing in that quarter—Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, Saint-Severin,
and the tower of the Lycee Henri IV—are more modern; only the
old Roman Thermae, now part of the Musee de Cluny, within the walls,
and the Abbey Tower of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, outside, in the fields,
were standing in the year 1100. Politically, Paris was a small provincial
town before the reign of Louis-le-Gros (1108- 37), who cleared its
gates of its nearest enemies; but as a school, Paris was even then
easily first. Students crowded into it by thousands, till the town
is said to have contained more students than citizens, Modern Paris
seems to have begun as a university town before it had a university.
Students flocked to it
from great distances, encouraged and supported by charity, and stimulated
by privileges, until they took entire possession of what is still
called the Latin Quarter from the barbarous Latin they chattered;
and a town more riotous, drunken, and vicious than it became, in the
course of time, hardly existed even in the Middle Ages.
In 1100, when enthusiasm
was fresh and faith in science was strong, the great mass of students
came there to study, and, having no regular university organization
or buildings, they thronged the cloister of Notre Dame—not our
Notre Dame, which dates only from 1163, but the old Romanesque cathedral
which stood on the same spot—and there they listened, and retained
what they could remember, for they were not encouraged to take notes
even if they were rich enough to buy notebooks, while manuscripts
were far beyond their means. One valuable right the students seem
to have had—that of asking questions and even of disputing with
the lecturer provided they followed the correct form of dialectics.
—Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
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Vista
of Paris from atop Notre Dame - 45k
