The schools they were pressing to were those of the Royal College of France. Already in 1517 Erasmus had been offered a salary of a thousand francs a year, with promise of further increment, to undertake the direction of the college, but declined to leave his patron the emperor. The prime movers in the great scheme were the king's confessor, Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Budé, who in 1530 was himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred gold crowns (about £80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The king's vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance (_nourriture_) of six hundred scholars, where the most famous doctors in Christendom should offer gratuitous teaching in all the sciences and learned languages, was never executed. Too much treasure had been wasted in Italy, and it was not till the reign of Louis XIII. that it was partially carried out. The first stone was laid in 1610, but the college as we now see it was not completed till 1770; before the construction the professors taught in the colleges of Treguier and Cambray. Chairs were founded for Arabic by Henry III., for surgery, anatomy and botany by Henry IV., and for Syrian by Louis XIV. Little is changed to-day; the placards, so familiar to students in Paris, announcing the lectures, are indited in French instead of in Latin as of old; the lectures are still free to all, and the most famous scholars of the day teach there, but in French and not in Latin.[103] How dramatic are the contrasts of history! While the new learning was organising itself amid the pomp of royal patronage, while the young Calvin was sitting at the feet of its professors and the Lutheran heresy germinating at Paris, Ignatius Loyola, an obscure Spanish soldier and gentleman of thirty-seven years of age, was sitting--a strange mature figure--among the boisterous young students at the College of St. Barbara, patiently preparing himself for dedication to the service of the menaced Church of Rome; and in 1534, on the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a little group of six companions met around the fervent student, in the crypt of the old church at Montmartre, and decided to found on the holy hill of St. Denis' martyrdom the first house of the Society of Jesus. In 1528, says the writer of the so-called _Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris_, the king began to pull down the great tower of the Louvre, in order to transform the château into a _logis de plaisance_, "yet was it great pity for the castle was very fair and high and strong, and a most proper prison to hold great men."