Note 197 — Chapter XIV

Rutebœuf, the celebrated crusading minstrel of the thirteenth century, whose reckless sarcasm spared no one, not even St. Louis himself, endeavoured to console the defeated seculars by directing his most cutting satire against their opponents, in a piece entitled “La descorde de l’université et des Jacobins.” The poem contains many curious illustrations of the manners and studies of the Paris students, and it need hardly be said that the Jacobins fare but badly. When first the friars came into the world, he says, they took lodgings with humility, but now they are masters of Paris and Rome,