The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 03Stevenson, Robert Louis
History
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 03
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century; Horror tales; Literature -- History and criticism
The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were, to our way
of thinking, somewhat incomplete. Worldly and monkish elements were
presented in a curious confusion, which the youth might disentangle for
himself. If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much
hair-drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in
the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The
lecture-room of a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the same roof
with establishments of a very different and peculiarly unedifying order.
The students had extraordinary privileges, which by all accounts they
abused extraordinarily. And while some condemned themselves to an almost
sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the schools, swaggered
in the street "with their thumbs in their girdle," passed the night in
riot, and behaved themselves as the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo
in the romance of "Notre Dame de Paris." Villon tells us himself that he
was among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal. The burlesque
erudition in which he sometimes indulged implies no more than the merest
smattering of knowledge; whereas his acquaintance with blackguard haunts
and industries could only have been acquired by early and consistent
impiety and idleness. He passed his degrees, it is true; but some of us
who have been to modern Universities will make their own reflections on
the value of the test. As for his three pupils, Colin Laurent, Girard
Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau--if they were really his pupils in any
serious sense--what can we say but God help them! And sure enough, by
his own description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant as
was to be looked for from the views and manners of their rare preceptor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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