We have little information about the abbey at that precise date, but history has much to say of its affairs some thirty or forty years afterwards, and thus affords a retrospective light. In the year 1146 Innocent the Second paid a visit to Paris. The relics of St. Genevieve were one of the treasures of the city, and thither his holiness went with his retinue, and King Louis and his followers. In the crush that was caused in the abbey church, the servants of the canons quarrelled with those of the court, and one of them was unlucky enough to bring his staff down with some force on the royal pate. That was a death-blow to the gay life of the abbey. Paris, through the abbot of St. Denis, who was also the first royal councillor, quickly obtained royal and papal assent to the eviction of the canons, and they were soon summarily turned out on the high road. They did not yield without a struggle, it is true. Many a night afterwards, when the canons regular who replaced them were in the midst of their solemn midnight chant, the evicted broke in the doors of the church, and made such turmoil inside, that the chanters could not hear each other across the choir. And when they did eventually depart for less rigorous surroundings, they thoughtfully took with them a good deal of the gold from Genevieve’s tomb and other ecclesiastical treasures, which were not reclaimed until after many adventures. To this abbey of St. Genevieve, then, the militant master led his followers, and he began at once to withdraw the students from Notre Dame, as he candidly tells us. If Bishop Galo and his chapter found their cloistral school deserted, they might be induced to consider Abélard’s gifts and influence. So the war went on merrily between the two camps. The masters fulminated against each other; the students ran from school to school, and argued it out on the bridge and in the taverns, and brought questions to their logical conclusion in the Pré-aux-clercs.[9] There was certainly, as we saw previously, ample room for litigation in the problems of mediæval dialectics. John of Salisbury studied dialectics under Abélard at St. Genevieve (though not in the abbey) at a later date, and he tells us that when he returned to Paris twelve years afterwards he found his dialectical friends just where he had left them. ‘They had not added the smallest proposition,’ he says contemptuously. Little John preferred ‘philology,’ as they called classical studies in his day. [9] Until a comparatively recent date ‘aller sur le Pré’ meant, in the language of the Latin Quarter, to settle an affair of honour.