Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

The family had inherited from the brothers Packet the fief of Tirechappe, which was held of the Bishop
of Paris, and the twenty-one houses of which had, since the thirteenth century, been the object of
countless litigations in the Ecclesiastical Court. As owner of this fief, Claude Follow was one of the
“seven times twenty-one” seigneurs claiming manorial dues in Paris and its suburbs; and in that capacity
his name was long to be seen inscribed between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to Maître François le
Rez, and the College of Tours, in the cartulary deposited at Saint-Martin des Champs.
From his childhood Claude Follow had been destined by his parents for the priesthood. He had been
taught to read in Latin; he had early been trained to keep his eyes down-cast, and to speak in subdued
tones. While still quite a child his father had bound him to the monastic seclusion of the Collége de
Torchi in the University, and there he had grown up over the missal and the lexicon.
He was, however, by nature a melancholy, reserved, serious boy, studying with ardour and learning
easily. He never shouted in the recreation hour; he mixed but little in the bacchanalia of the Rue du
Fouarre; did not know what it was to dare alapas et capillos laniare, 45 and had taken no part in that
Students’ riot of 1463, which the chroniclers gravely record as “The Sixth Disturbance in the
University.” It rarely happened that he jibed at the poor scholars of Montaigu for their “cappettes,” from
which they derived their nickname, or the exhibitioners of the Collége de Dormans for their smooth
tonsure and their tricoloured surcoats of dark blue, light blue and violet cloth—azurini coloris et bruni,
as the charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes puts it.
On the other hand, he was assiduous in his attendance at the higher and lower schools of the Rue
Saint-Jean de Beauvais. The first scholar whom the Abbé de Saint-Pierre de Val caught sight of,
established against a pillar in the Ecole Saint-Vendregesile, exactly opposite to his desk when he began
his lecture on Canon Law, was invariably Claude Follow, armed with his inkhorn, chewing his pen,
scribbling on his threadbare knees, or, in winter, blowing on his fingers. The first pupil Messier Miles
d’Isliers, doctor of ecclesiastical law, saw arrive breathless every Monday morning as the door of the
Chef-Saint-Denis schools opened, was Claude Follow. Consequently, by the time he was sixteen, the
young cleric was a match in mystical theology for a Father of the Church, and in scholastic theology for a
Doctor of the Sorbonne.
Having finished with theology, he threw himself into canonical law and the study of the decretals.
From the Magister Sententiarum he had fallen upon the Capitularies of Charlemagne, and in his
insatiable hunger for knowledge had devoured decretal after decretal: those of Theodore, Bishop of
Hispalis, those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms, those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; then the decretal of
Gratian, which came after Charlemagne’s Capitularies; then the collection of Gregory IX; then the epistle
Super specula of Honorius III. He thoroughly investigated and made himself familiar with that vast and
stormy period of bitter and protracted struggle between Civil and Ecclesiastical Law during the chaos of
the Middle Ages, a period which Bishop Theodore began in 618, and Pope Gregory closed in 1227.
The decretals assimilated, he turned his attention to medicine and the liberal arts; studied the science of
herbs and of slaves; became an expert in the treatment of fevers and contusions, of wounds and of
abscesses. Jacques d’Espars would have passed him as physician; Richard Hellain, as surgeon. He ran
through the degrees of Licentiate, Master, and Doctor of Arts; he studied languages: Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew—a thrice inner sanctuary of learning seldom penetrated at that time. He was possessed by a
veritable rage for acquiring and storing up knowledge. At eighteen, he had made his way through the