Calvin had come to Paris in his fourteenth year, and left it when he was nineteen--the years when a lad becomes a man, and his character is definitely formed. If we are to judge by his own future references, no one had more formative influence over him than Mathurin Cordier--short as had been the period of their familiar intercourse. Calvin had shown a singularly acute mind, and proved himself to be a scholar who invariably surpassed his fellow students. He was always surrounded by attached friends--the three brothers de Montmor, the younger members of the famous family of Cop, and many others. These student friends were devoted to him all his life. Many of them settled with him at Geneva. Calvin left the College de Montaigu in 1528. Sometime during the same year another celebrated pupil entered it. This was Ignatius Loyola. Whether the two great leaders attended College together, whether they ever met, it is impossible to say--the dates are not precise enough. "Perhaps they crossed each other in some street of Mount Sainte-Geneviève: the young Frenchman of eighteen on horseback as usual, and the Spaniard of six and thirty on foot, his purse furnished with some pieces of gold he owed to charity, shoving before him an ass burdened with his books, and carrying in his pocket a manuscript, entitled _Exercitia Spiritualia_."[101] Calvin left Paris because his father had now resolved that his son should be a lawyer and not a theologian. Gerard Cauvin had quarrelled with the ecclesiastics of Noyon, and had even been excommunicated. He refused to render his accounts in two executry cases, and had remained obstinate. Why he was so, it is impossible to say. His children had no difficulty in arranging matters after his death. The quarrel ended the hopes of the father to provide well for his son in the Church, and he ordered him to quit Paris for the great law school at Orleans. It is by no means improbable that the father's decision was very welcome to the son. Bèze tells us that Calvin had already got some idea of the true religion, had begun to study the Holy Scriptures, and to separate himself from the ceremonies of the Church;[102]--perhaps his friendship with Pierre Robert Olivétan, a relation, a native of Noyon, and the translator of the Bible into French, had brought this about. The young man went to Orleans in the early part of 1528 and remained there for a year, then went on to Bourges, in order to attend the lectures of the famous publicist, André Alciat, who was destined to be as great a reformer of the study of law as Calvin was of the study of theology. In Orleans with its Humanism, and in Bourges with its incipient Protestantism, Calvin was placed in a position favourable for the growth of ideas which had already taken root in his mind. At Bourges he studied Greek under Wolmar, a Lutheran in all but the name, and dedicated to him long afterwards his _Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians_.