no other cloak than a chlamyde embroidered with gold, your girdle must be ornamented with precious stones, and gold must sparkle even upon your shoes, and on the cane which you carry.  O France! if you do not abandon such luxurious extravagance, you will lose your courage and your country.”  Hugh Capet, who became king of France in 987, fixed his residence at Paris, thus again constituting it the capital of the kingdom, and his son and successor Robert, being a strict devotee, built and repaired several churches which had been greatly injured by the Normans, and Paris began in his reign to assume an appearance of improvement, which continued until it received a check from an ill-timed joke of Philippe the First, who made a satirical remark upon William the Conqueror of England having become rather unwieldy, which so provoked that choleric monarch that he laid waste a great portion of Philippe’s dominions; when his progress was checked by his falling from his horse, which occasioned his death and thus delivered Philippe from a most powerful enemy.  In the following reign, that of Lewis the Fat, learning began to make considerable progress, and the colleges of Paris to acquire a high celebrity, and amongst the professors whose reputation was of the highest, was Abelard, no one before having succeeded in attracting so many pupils.  In 1118 he established a school in Paris, but from a variety of persecutions which he endured, he was frequently obliged to retire to different parts of France; his unfortunate attachment to Heloise is but too well known, and she ultimately became the abbess of a convent which Abelard founded at Nogent-sur-Seine, and which he called Paraclet.  The number of pupils at one time are stated to have been three thousand, and he instructed them in the open air; it is also asserted that of his followers fifty became either bishops or archbishops, twenty cardinals, and one pope, Celestin II.  In fact the fame of Abelard had arrived at such an altitude that he was the means of giving a new era to Paris, which was designated the city of letters; other professors became highly celebrated, and some authors pretend that the immense concourse of students who ultimately flocked to Paris, exceeded the number of the inhabitants, and there was much difficulty in finding the means of lodging them; how great must have been the anxiety for learning, as the masters were exceedingly brutal and imparted their knowledge to the pupil by the force of blows, which at length deterred many students from placing themselves under the charge of such preceptors.  This extraordinary desire for obtaining education appears to have been almost a sudden impulse, as the immediate descendants of Hugh Capet could not read or write, but were obliged to make a mark as the signature to their edicts, whilst those who possessed that accomplishment were styled clerks.  Although much brilliance was shed over the reign of Louis the Sixth by the learning of Abelard and the professors who followed him, yet soon after