exercises. This is the burden of a letter to John of Salisbury by Peter
de la Celle, abbot of a monastery near Rheims, in 1164. Incidentally it
gives his view concerning Paris.

"Peter de la Celle to John of Salisbury concerning the perils that
encompass souls at Paris and concerning the true school of truth."

His own Abbot to his own clerk. You have, my well-beloved, chosen
a sufficiently delightful exile, where joys, though they be vain,
are in superabundance, where the supply of bread and wine exceeds
in richness that of your own land where there is the frequent
access of friends, where the dwelling together of comrades is
common. Who else besides you is there beneath the sky who has not
thought Paris the place of delights, the garden of plantations,
the field of first fruits?

Yet, though smiling [at these things], you have said truly that
where pleasure of the body is greater and fuller, there is the
exile of the soul; and where luxury reigns there the soul is a
wretched and afflicted hand-maid. O Paris! How well-suited art
thou to captivate and deceive souls! In thee are the nets of the
vices, in thee the arrow of Hell transfixes the hearts of the
foolish! This my John has felt and therefore he has named it an
exile. Would that you were leaving behind that exile of yours
just as it is, and were hastening to your native land not in word
and tongue only but in very deed and truth! There, in the book of
life would you be looking, not upon forms and elements, but upon
divinity itself, as it really is, as upon truth--eye to eye,
without labor of reading, without tediousness of seeing, without
fallacies and mistakes of understanding, without anxiety of