Erasmus was, then, a charity boarder and ought, in all reason, to have been grateful for even this poor opportunity of enjoying the privileges toward which he had for years been looking forward as the summit of his hopes. Yet he can nowhere mention these Parisian days without the most doleful complaints of his sufferings from foul air, bad food, and severe discipline. The most famous of these diatribes occurs in the Colloquy called Ἰχθυοφαγία--"The Eating of Fish." Erasmus' theme is here the excessive devotion to formal rules and observances in religion to the sacrifice of more important things. The eating of fish is only a text on which he hangs extremely bold and acute criticism of would-be religious persons, who for their lives would not violate the rules of the Church against the eating of meat, but were ready on the other hand to run into any excesses of fleshly dissipation. The speakers are a butcher and a salt-fishmonger. After they have gone on matching stories for a long time, the fishmonger suddenly breaks out: [28] "'Thirty years ago I lived at Paris in a college which has its name from vinegar (_acetum_).' [The Latin form of Montaigu was _Mons acutus_.] The butcher answers: 'Well, that is a name of wisdom! What are you giving us? A salt-fishmonger in such a sour college? No wonder he's such a keen one at quibbles of theology! For there, as I hear, the very walls have theological minds.' "_Fishm._--'You're right, but all I got there was a body infected with the worst kind of humours and a plentiful supply of lice. But let me go on as I began. The college was at that time governed by John Standonch, a man whose disposition (_affectum_) you would not condemn, but in whom you would like to see more discrimination. For you couldn't help greatly approving his regard for the poor, mindful as he was of his own youth passed in extreme poverty. If he had so far relieved the poverty of youths that they might go on with honest study, yet not so far that abundance would have led to extravagance, he would have deserved praise. But he went into the thing with beds so hard, food so coarse and so scanty, vigils and work so severe that within a year the first trial brought many youths of excellent parts and of great promise, some to their deaths, some to blindness, some to madness and not a few to leprosy. Some of these I knew myself, and surely not one escaped danger. Now can't anybody see that that is cruelty to one's neighbour? And not content with this he put on (them) hood and cloak and took from them all animal food--and then he transferred such nursery-gardens as this into far-distant regions. If every one should indulge his impulses (_affectus_) as far as he did, the result would be that the like of these people would fill up the whole world. From such beginnings arose monasteries, which now threaten both kings and pontiffs.