O Holy God of gods in Sion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made
glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the
Paradise of the world, and to linger there; where the days seemed
ever few for the greatness of our love! There are delightful
libraries, more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are
luxuriant parks of all manner of volumes; there are Academic
meads shaken by the tramp of scholars; there are lounges of
Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and
porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts
and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most
excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing
sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric
apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers;
there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius
arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin
Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus
collected in Phoenician letters; there indeed opening our
treasuries and unfastening our purse-strings we scattered money
with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with mud and
sand. It is naught, it is naught, saith every buyer. But in
vain; for behold how good and how pleasant it is to gather
together the arms of the clerical warfare, that we may have the
means to crush the attacks of heretics, if they arise.

Further, we are aware that we obtained most excellent
opportunities of collecting in the following way. From our early
years we attached to our society with the most exquisite
solicitude and discarding all partiality all such masters and
scholars and professors in the several faculties as had become