Abélard felt that he need strive no longer in the hall of the poor canon regular, and he turned his attention to the actual occupant of the chair of Notre Dame. We need not delay in determining the name of the luckless master, whether it was Robert of Melun, as some think, or Adam of the Little Bridge, or Peter the Eater—poor man! a sad name to come down the ages with; it was merely an allusion to his voracious reading. He had the saving grace of common-sense, whatever other gifts he was burdened with. As soon as he saw the collapse of William’s authority and the dispersal of his pupils, he resolved to decline a contest with the irresistible Breton. He voluntarily yielded the chair to Abélard, and took his place on the hay-strewn floor amongst the new worshippers. Such a consummation, however, was not to the taste of the angered scholastic. A substitute had, it seems, the power to subdelegate his license, so that the installation of Abélard in the cathedral school was correct and canonical. But William was still scholastic of the place, and he had an obvious remedy. Robert, or Peter, or whoever it may have been, depended on him, and he at once set to work to recall the delegation. Abélard says that he trumped up a false and most obnoxious charge against the intermediary. He did, at all events, succeed in changing the appointment, and thus rendering Abélard’s subdelegated license null. The new-comer was a man of different temper, so that Abélard only occupied the great chair ‘for a few days.’ He could not teach in or about the episcopal school without a ‘respondent,’ and he therefore once more transferred his chair to Melun.[8] [8] To transfer a chair was frequently a physical operation in those days. There is, in one of the old records, a story of a dissatisfied master and his pupils removing their chair to another town, higher up the river. They were not welcome, it seems, and their chair was pitched into the river to find its way home. The Prior of St. Victor’s had won a pyrrhic victory. Whether or no Abélard had learned a lesson from him, and began in his turn to practise the subtle art of diplomacy, we cannot say, but Paris was soon too warm for the prior. The lawless students respected his authority no longer, and clamoured for Abélard. The king was dead: long live the king! They discovered that William’s conversion was peculiarly incomplete. For a man who had felt an inner call to leave the world, he still evinced a fairly keen interest in its concerns. William found their ‘ceaseless raillery’ intolerable. He fled, says Archbishop Roger Vaughan, ‘to hide his shame in a distant monastery.’ Abélard merely records that ‘he transferred his community to a certain town at some distance from the city.’ The path to Paris lay open once more. CHAPTER III PROGRESS OF THE ACADEMIC WAR