Baudolino by Umberto Eco

fine things he was learning. Beatrice was very sensitive to these revelations, which whetted her own appetite for knowledge, and she read and reread the letters in which Baudolino told her about grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, and of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. But Baudolino felt more and more cowardly, because, writing to her, he remained silent about what most oppressed his heart and about all the other things he did, which cannot be told to a mother or to a sister, or to an empress or, still less, to the beloved woman.
    Mostly the students played ball, true, but they also brawled with the people of the Abbey of Saint Germain, or among students of different origin, Picards against Normans, for example, and they traded insults in Latin, so that anyone could understand you were offending him. These were all things frowned upon by the Great Provost, who sent his bowmen to arrest the most unruly. Obviously, at this point the students forgot their differences and all together fell to exchanging blows with the bowmen.
    No men in the world were more easily corrupted than the bowmen of the provost. So if a student was arrested, they all had to dig into their purses to persuade the bowmen to set him free. This made the pleasures of Paris even more costly.
    Second, a student who has no amorous affairs is derided by his fellows. Unfortunately, the most inaccessible thing for the students was women. There were very few female students to be seen, and there were legends still circulated about the beautiful Héloïse, who had cost her lover the cutting off of his pudenda, even if it was one thing to be a student, hence by definition ill-famed and yet tolerated, and another to be a professor, like the great and unhappy Abélard. Mercenary love was expensive, and so they had to rely on the occasional tavern wench or some common woman of the neighborhood, but in that quarter there were always more students than females.
    Unless they managed to assume an idle air and ribald look while strolling on the Ile de la Cité, and thus succeed in seducing ladies of higher station. Much desired were the wives of the butchers of La Grève, who, after an honored career in their trade, no longer slaughtered cattle but governed the meat market, behaving like gentlemen. With a husband born quartering oxen, who had achieved comfort late in life, the wives were alert to the fascination of the more handsome students. But these ladies wore sumptuous dresses decorated with fur, and silver and bejeweled belts, which made it difficult at first sight to distinguish them from grand prostitutes who, though the laws forbade it, usually dressed in the same fashion. This exposed the students to some unfortunate misunderstandings, for which they were all the more derided by their friends.
    If a student succeeded in winning a real lady, or indeed a virtuous maiden, sooner or later husbands and fathers would find out, and there would be a fight, sometimes with weapons; and someone died or was wounded, almost always the husband or father, and then there was more brawling with the bowmen of the provost. Baudolino hadn't killed anyone, and in general he also stayed well away from brawls, but with one husband (and butcher) he had had to deal. Ardent in love but cautious in matters of war, when he saw the husband enter the room, swinging one of those hooks used to hang slaughtered animals, Baudolino immediately tried to jump out the window. But, as
he was judiciously calculating the distance before making the leap, he had had time to receive a slash on the cheek, thus decorating forever his face with a scar worthy of a man-at-arms.
    On the other hand, even winning working-class women was not an everyday occurrence and demanded long sieges (at the expense of lessons), and whole days spent observing from the window, which generated boredom. Then dreams of seduction were abandoned, and the youths threw water down on the passersby, or they used the women