Most of the scholars at Notre Dame were incensed at the success of Abélard. In those earlier days the gathering was predominantly clerical; the more so, on account of William’s championship of orthodoxy. But as the controversy proceeded, and rumour bore its echo to the distant schools, the number and the diversity of the scholars increased. Many of the youths took the side of the handsome, brilliant young noble, and encouraged him to resist. He decided to open a school. There was little organisation in the schools at that period—the university not taking shape until fully sixty years afterwards (Compayré)—and Abélard would hardly need a ‘license’ for the purpose, outside the immediate precincts of the cloister. But William was angry and powerful. It were more discreet, at least, not to create a direct and flagrant opposition to him. The little group of scholars moved to Melun, and raised a chair for their new master in that royal town. It was thirty miles away, down the valley of the Seine; but a thirty mile walk was a trifle in the days when railways were unknown, and William soon noticed a leakage in his class. Moreover, Melun was an important town, the king spending several months there every year. William made strenuous efforts to have the new academy suppressed, but he seems to have quarrelled with some of the courtiers, and these took up the cause of the new master of noble rank. When Abélard saw the powerlessness of the chancellor of Notre Dame, he decided to come a little nearer. There was another fortified and royal town, Corbeil by name, about half-way to Paris, and thither he transferred his chair and his followers. The move was made, he tells us, for the convenience of his students. His reputation was already higher than William’s, and the duel of the masters had led to a noisy conflict between their respective followers. Corbeil being a comfortable day’s walk from Paris, there was a constant stream of rival pupils flowing between the two. In the schools and the taverns, on the roads and the bridges, nothing was heard but the increasing jargon of the junior realists and conceptualists. Besides the great problem, dialectics had countless lesser ones that would furnish argumentative material for an eternity. ‘Whether the pig that is being driven to market is held by the man or the rope’; ‘whether a shield that is white on one side and black on the other may be called either black or white,’ and problems of that kind, are not to be compared in point of depth and fecundity with such mere matters of fact as the origin of species. But the long and severe strain had gravely impaired Abélard’s health; he was compelled to close his school, and return to Brittany. William was not the only one who rejoiced. The Church was beginning to view with some alarm the spread of the new doctrine and the new spirit. Cynical rivals were complaining that ‘the magician’ had brought ‘a plague of frogs’ on the land.