Philip was disappointed in him and preferred the invisible knight, but the wood was all he had desired.

It was indeed a blessed place, and the old scribe had known it, for a scroll of gold hung above it with the words "Sylva Vitae." At the age of ten the boy had passed far beyond Father Ambrose, and was sucking the Abbey dry of its learning, like some second Abelard.

In the cloisters of Montmirail were men who had a smattering of the New Knowledge, about which Italy had gone mad, and, by the munificence of the Countess Catherine, copies had been made by the Italian stationarii of some of the old books of Rome which the world had long forgotten.
In the Abbey library, among a waste of antiphonaries and homilies and monkish chronicles, were to be found texts of Livy and Lucretius and the letters of Cicero.

Philip was already a master of Latin, writing it with an elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine.

At fourteen he entered the college of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholastic pedantry.