When Abélard and his admirers returned from Melun to Paris, they found William’s new successor sitting resolutely in the chair of Notre Dame. From some manuscripts of the ‘Story of my Calamities’ it appears that he had won repute by his lectures on Priscian, the Latin grammarian. He had thus been able to augment the little band who remained faithful to William and to orthodoxy with a certain number of personal admirers. Clearly, the episcopal school must be taken by storm. And so, says Abélard, his pen leaping forward more quickly at the recollection, twenty years afterwards, ‘we pitched our camp on the hill of St. Genevieve.’ During the century that preceded the coalescence of the schools into a university, St. Genevieve was the natural home of rebellion. Roscelin had taught there. Joscelin the Red, another famous nominalist, was teaching there. The ‘feminists’ had raised their tabernacle there; the Jews their synagogue. From its physical advantages the hill naturally presented itself to the mind of every master who had designs on the episcopal school or the episcopal philosophy. Its gentle, sunny flanks offered ideal situations for schools, and the students were breaking away more and more from the vicinity of the cloister and the subordination it expressed. A new town was rapidly forming at its foot, by the river, and on the northern slope; a picturesque confusion of schools, chapels, brothels, taverns, and hospices. It was the cradle of the famed Latin Quarter—_very_ Latin in those days, when the taverns swung out their Latin signs, ‘taverna de grangia,’ ‘ad turbotum,’ ‘apud duos cygnos,’ and so forth, and the songs that came from the latticed, vine-clothed arbours were half French, half Celtic-Latin. Abélard did not open a private school on ‘the hill.’ He delivered his assault on ‘the island’ from the abbey of St. Genevieve at the summit, the site now occupied by the Pantheon. There is nothing in the least remarkable in the abbey opening its gates to one who was obviously bent on assailing the great ecclesiastical school, and who was already regarded as the parent of a new and freer generation of students. The secular canons had little deference for authority and little love of asceticism at that period. St. Norbert had fruitlessly tried to reform them, and had been forced to embody his ideal in a new order. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, the classical censor of the twelfth century, makes bitter comment on their hawks and horses, their jesters and singing-girls, and their warmer than spiritual affection for their sisters in religion, the ‘canonesses.’ It was natural enough that an abbey of secular canons should welcome the witty and brilliant young noble—and the wealth that accompanied him.