  Such is the historical record—a handful of relatively minor  details.[2]  Buridan's fame as a teacher and philosopher, however, quickly turned his life into the stuff of legend. There are stories that he met his end when the King of France had him thrown into the Seine River in a sack because of a scandalous affair with the Queen, that he went on to found the University of Vienna after being expelled from Paris for his nominalist teachings, and that he even hit the future Pope Clement VI over the head with a shoe while competing for the affections of the wife of a German shoemaker (the blow apparently created the prodigious memory for which Clement was widely known). But none of these stories can be independently verified, and most are inconsistent with what we do know about  him.[3]  Nevertheless, they illustrate what the French scholar Edmond Faral called the “bruits de ville” or ‘buzz’ surrounding Buridan's name in Parisian circles, which continued for some time after his death (Faral 1950, 16).