The pupil who had left Paris when both William and Abélard disappeared in 1113 would find a marvellous change on returning to it about 1116 or 1117. He would find the lecture hall and the cloister and the quadrangle, under the shadow of the great cathedral, filled with as motley a crowd of youths and men as any scene in France could show. Little groups of French and Norman and Breton nobles chattered together in their bright silks and fur-tipped mantles, and with slender swords dangling from embroidered belts; ‘shaven in front like thieves, and growing luxuriant, curly tresses at the back like harlots,’ growls Jacques de Vitry, who saw them, vying with each other in the length and crookedness of their turned-up shoes.[14] Anglo-Saxons looked on, in long fur-lined cloaks, tight breeches, and leathern hose swathed with bands of many coloured cloth. Stern-faced northerners, Poles, and Germans, in fur caps and coloured girdles and clumsy shoes, or with feet roughly tied up in the bark of trees, waited impatiently for the announcement of ‘Li Mestre.’ Pale-faced southerners had braved the Alps and the Pyrenees under the fascination of ‘the wizard.’ Shaven and sandalled monks, black-habited clerics, black canons, secular and regular, black in face too, some of them, heresy-hunters from the neighbouring abbey of St. Victor, mingled with the crowd of young and old, grave and gay, beggars and nobles, sleek citizens and bronzed peasants. [14] The Count of Anjou had just invented them to hide the enormity of his bunions. Flattering courtiers found them excellent. The English king’s jester had exaggerated the turned-up points, and the nobles were driving the practice to death, as is the aristocratic wont.