asures and unfastening our purse-strings we
scattered money with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with
mud and sand."

In 1349 the number of professors (_maistres-regents_) on the rolls was
502; in 1403 they had increased to 709, to which must be added more
than 200 masters of theology and canon law. "The University," wrote
Pope Alexander IV. in a papal bull, "is to the Church what the tree of
life was to the earthly Paradise, a fruitful source of all learning,
diffusing its wisdom over the whole universe; there the mind is
enlighted and ignorance banished and Jesus Christ gives to His spouse
an eloquence which confounds all her enemies."

But decadence soon ensued. The multiplication and enrichment of
colleges proved fatal to the old democratic vigour and equality. Some
colleges pretended to superiority and the movement lost its unity.
Scholasticism had done its work and no new movement took its place.
Teachers lost all originality and did but ruminate and comment on the
works of their great predecessors. Schools declined in numbers,
scholars in attendance and ordinances were needed to correct the
abuses covered by the title of scholar. The Jacobin and Cordelier
teachers, moreover, had exhausted much life from the university; but
its fame continued, and Luther in his early conflicts with the papacy
appealed against the pope to the university of Paris. But it made the
fatal blunder of opposing the Reform and the Renaissance, instead of
absorbing them, and the interest of those great movements centres
around the college of France.

In the general decay, however, the Jesuit College of Clermont, known
later as of Louis le Grand, stood forth renowned and exuberant. During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the erudition of its
teachers, their excellent method and admirable discipline, made it the
premier college of Paris and in the heyday of its fame five hundred
scholars crowded its halls, among them the scions of the nobility of
France. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the university had
its seat in the college and concentrated there the endowments, or such
as had escaped spoliation, of twenty-six suppressed colleges. The
college of Louis le Grand and nine others of the multitude that
clustered around the hill of St. Genevieve, were all that survived
when the Revolution burst forth, and it is not without interest to
note that on 19th June 1781, the central body sitting at the famous
Jesuit