Whatever be the correct analysis of the motive—and it was probably a complex feeling, including all the impulses suggested, which William himself scarcely cared to examine too narrowly—the fact is that in the year 1108 he donned the black cassock of the canon regular, and settled with a few companions in the priory of St. Victor. The life of the canons regular was a compromise between that of the sterner monks and the unascetic life of the secular canons and secular clergy. They followed, on the whole, the well-known rule of St. Augustine. They arose at midnight to chant their matins, but, unlike the Cistercians, they returned to bed as soon as the ‘office’ was over. They ate meat three times a week, and were not restricted in the taking of fish and eggs. They had linen underclothing, and much friendly intercourse with each other, and they were less rigidly separated from the world. Altogether, not too rough a path to higher dignities—or to heaven—and (a not unimportant point) one that did not lead far from Paris. Such was the foundation of one of the most famous schools of mystic theology. The abbey that William instituted, before he was removed to the coveted dignity in 1113, has attained an immortality in the world of thought through such inmates as Richard and Hugh of St. Victor. Abélard’s first impulse on hearing the news was to repair at once to the cloistral school. He found the chair occupied. William had not, in fact, resigned his title of scholastic, and he had placed a substitute in the chair. It was a poor ruse, for there was now no master in Christendom who could long endure the swift, keen shafts of the ambitious Breton. Abélard would quickly make the chair of Notre Dame uncomfortable for the most pachydermatous substitute; and he seems to have commenced the edifying task at once, when he heard that the unfortunate William had set up a chair of rhetoric at St. Victor. Like a hawk, Master Peter descended on the ill-fated canon. The Bishop of Mans had, it appears, stimulated William into a renewal of activity, and he had chosen that apparently safe section of the trivium, the art of rhetoric.