 
IN the Prologue to Faust the Lord of Heaven justifies the existence of the restless, goading spirit of evil by the fact that man’s activity is all too prone to flag,— “Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh.” As with men so with empires: riches and inaction are hard to bear. It was not so much a corruption of public morals as a growing slackness and apathy in public life and an intellectual sloth that hastened the fall of the Roman Empire. Owing to the gradual exhaustion of the supply of slaves its economic basis was crumbling away. The ruling class was content to administer rather than to govern and unwilling or incompetent to grapple with the new order of things. The end of the fifth century is the beginning of the evil times of Gallic story. That fair land of France, “one of Nature’s choicest masterpieces, one of Ceres’ chiefest barns for corn, one of Bacchus’ prime wine cellars and of Neptune’s best salt-pits,” became the prey of the barbarian. The whole fabric of civilisation seem doomed to destruction. Gaul had become the richest and most populous of Roman provinces; its learning and literature were noised in Rome; its schools drew students from the mother city herself. But at the end of the sixth century Gregory of Tours deplores the fact that in his time there were neither books, nor readers, nor scholar who could compose in verse or prose, and that only the speech of the rustic was understood. He playfully scolds himself for muddling prepositions and confusing genders and cases, but his duty as a Christian priest is to instruct, not to charm, and so he tells the story of his times in such rustic Latin as he knows. He draws for us a vivid picture of Clovis, the founder of the French monarchy, his savage valour, his astuteness, his regal passion. After the victory over Syagrius, the shadowy king of the Romans, at Soissons, Clovis was met by St. RÉmi, who prayed that a vase of great price and wondrous beauty among the spoil might be returned to him. “Follow us,” said the king, “to Soissons, where the booty will be shared.” Before the division took place Clovis begged that the vase might be At this point of our story we meet the first of those noble women, heroic and wise, for whom French history is pre-eminent. In the first half of the fifth century St. Germain of Auxerre and St. Lew of Troyes, chosen by the prelates of France “for to go and quench an heresy that was in Great Britain, now called England, came to Nanterre for to be lodged and harboured and the people came against them for to have their benison. Among the people, St. Germain, by the enseignements of the Holy Ghost, espied out the little maid St. Genevieve, and made her come to him, and kissed her head and demanded her name, and whose daughter she was, and the people about her said that her name was Genevieve, and her father Severe, and her mother Geronce, which came unto him, and the holy man said: Is this child yours? They answered: Yea. Blessed be ye, said the holy man, when God hath given to you so noble lineage, know ye for certain that the day of her nativity the angels sang and hallowed great mystery in heaven with great joy and gladness. When on the morn she was brought to him again, he saw in her a sign celestial, commended her to God, and prayed that she would remember him in her orisons, and on his return to Paris, finding her in the city, he commended her to its people. Tidings came that “Attila, the felon knight of Hungary, had enterprised to destroy and waste the parts of France,” and the burgesses of Paris for great dread they had, sent their goods into cities more sure. Genevieve caused the good women of the town “to wake in fastings and orisons, and bade the merchants not to remove their goods for the city should have none harm.” At first the people hardened their hearts and reviled her, but at St. Germain’s prayers they believed in her, and our Lord “for her love did so much that the tyrants approached not Paris, thanks and glory to God and honour to the virgin.” At the siege of Paris by Childeric and his Franks, when the people were wasted by sickness and famine, “the holy virgin, that pity constrained, went by the Seine to Arcy and Troyes for to go fetch by ship some victuals. She stilled by her prayers a furious tempest and brought the ships back laden with wheat.” When the city was at length captured, King Childeric, although a paynim, saved at her intercession the lives of his prisoners, and one day, to escape her importunate pleadings for the lives of some criminals, fled out of the gates of Paris and shut them behind him. The saint lived to build a church over the tomb of St. Denis and to see Clovis become a Christian. She died in 509, and was buried on the hill of Lutetius, which ever since has borne her name.
“Her hope,” says the Golden Legend, from which we have chiefly drawn her story, “was nothing in worldly things, but in heavenly, for she believed in the holy scriptures that saith: Whoso giveth to the poor liveth for availe. The reward which they receive that give to poor people, the Holy Ghost had showed to her long tofore, and therefore she ceased not to weep, to adore and to do The faithful built a little wooden oratory over her tomb, which Clovis and his wife Clotilde replaced by a great basilica and monastery which became their burial-place. All that now recalls the church, whose length the king measured by the distance he could hurl his axe, is the so-called Tower of Clovis, a thirteenth-century structure in the Rue Clovis. The golden shrine of the saint, The conversion of Clovis is the capital fact of early French history. His queen Clotilde, niece of the Burgundian king, had long There was a stirring scene that Christmas at Rheims, when Clovis with his two sisters and three thousand of The conversion of Clovis was a triumph for the Church: in her struggle with the Arian heresy in Gaul, she was now able to enforce the arguments of the pen by the edge of the sword. The enemies of Clovis were the enemies of the Church, and as the representative of the Eastern emperor, she arrayed him, after the defeat of the Arian Goths in the South, in purple and hailed him Consul and Augustus at Tours. Her scribes are tender to his memory, for his Christianity was marked by few signs of grace. He remained the same savage monarch as before, and did not scruple to affirm his dynasty and extend his empire by treachery and by the assassination of his kinsmen. To the Franks, Jesus was but a new and more puissant tribal deity. “Long live the Christ who loves the Franks,” writes the author of the prologue to the Salic law; and Clothaire I., when the pangs of death seized him in his villa at CompiÈgne, cried out, “Who is this God of Heaven that thus allows the greatest kings of the earth to perish?” Nor was their ideal of kingship any loftier. Their kingdom was not a trust, but a possession to be divided among their heirs, and the jealousy and strife excited by the repeated partition among sons, make the history of the Merovingian
In the ninth century a story was current among the Clovis, in 508, made Paris the official capital of his realm, and at his death in 511 divided his possessions between his four sons—Thierry, Clodomir, Childebert, and Clothaire. Clodomir after a short reign met his death in battle, leaving his children to the guardianship of their grandmother, Clotilde. One day messengers came to her in the palace of the ThermÆ from Childebert and Clothaire praying that their nephews might be entrusted to them. Believing they were to be trained in kingly offices that they might succeed their father in due time, Clotilde granted their prayer and two of the children were sent to them in the palace of the CitÉ. Soon came another messenger, bearing a pair of shears and a naked sword, and Clotilde was bidden to determine the fate of her wards and to choose for them between the cloister and the edge of the sword. An angry exclamation escaped her: “If they are not to be Clothaire himself had narrowly escaped assassination when allied with Thierry during the wars with the Thuringians. Thierry invited his brother one day to a conference, having previously hidden some armed men behind the hangings in his tent. But the drapery was too short, and Clothaire as he entered caught sight of the assassins’ feet peeping through. He retained his arms and his escort. Thierry invented some fable to explain the interview, embraced his brother and bestowed on him a heavy silver plate. The fruits of kingship were bitter to Clothaire. Ere two years were past his rebellious and adulterous son, Chramm, escaped to Brittany and raised an army against him. Chramm and his allies were defeated, himself, his wife and children captured. Clothaire spared none. Chramm was strangled with a handkerchief, and his wife and children Four out of seven sons had survived him, and again the kingdom was divided. Charibert, king of Paris, soon died, and yet again a partition was made among the three survivors. To Siegbert fell Austrasia or Eastern France as far as the Rhine: to Chilperic, Neustria or Western France to the borders of Brittany and the Loire: Gontram’s lot was Burgundy. Once more the consuming flames of passion and greed burst forth, this time fanned by the fierce breath of feminine rivalry. Siegbert had married Brunehaut, daughter of the Visigoth king of Spain: Chilperic had espoused her sister, Galowinthe, after repudiating his first wife, Adowere. When the new queen of Neustria came to her throne she found herself the rival of Fredegonde, a common servant, with whom Chilperic had been living. He soon tired of his new wife, a gentle and pliant creature; Fredegonde regained her supremacy and one morning Galowinthe was found strangled in bed. The news came to the court of Austrasia and Brunehaut goaded King Siegbert to avenge her sister’s death. Meanwhile Chilperic had married Fredegonde, who quickly compassed the murder of her only rival, the repudiated queen, Adowere. At the intervention of Gontram war was, for a time, averted, and Chilperic, by the judgment of the whole people, made to compensate Brunehaut by the restoration of her sister’s dowry. But Chilperic soon drew the sword and civil war again devastated the land. By foreign aid Siegbert captured and spoiled Paris and compelled a peace. Scarcely, however, had the victor dismissed his German allies, when Chilperic fell upon him again. Siegbert now determined to make an end. He entered Paris, and the Neustrians having accepted him as king, he prepared to crush his enemy at Tournay. As he set forth, St. Germain, bishop of Paris, seized his horse’s bridle and warned him that the grave he was But Fredegonde’s tale of blood was not yet complete. She soon learned that MerovÉe, one of Chilperic’s two sons by Adowere, had married Brunehaut. MerovÉe followed the rest of her victims, and Clovis, the second son, together with a sister of Adowere, next glutted her vengeance. “One day, after leaving the Synod of Paris,” writes St. Gregory, “I had bidden King Chilperic adieu and had withdrawn conversing with the bishop of Albi. As we crossed the courtyard of the palace Thirty years were yet to pass before the curtain falls on the acts of the rival queens, their sons and grandsons, but the heart revolts at the details of the wars and lusts of these savage potentates. Gregory begins the fifth book of his Annals by expressing the weariness that falls upon him when he recalls the manifold civil wars of the Franks.
Let us make an end of this part of our story. By her son, Clothaire II., Fredegonde continued to dominate Neustria: Brunehaut ruled over Austrasia and Burgundy through her sons Theodobert II. and Thierry II. Battle and murder had destroyed Brunehaut’s children and her children’s children until none were left to rule over the realms but herself and the four sons of Thierry II. The nobles, furious at the further tyranny of a cruel and imperious woman, plotted her ruin, and in 613, when Brunehaut, sure of victory, marched with two armies against Clothaire II., she was betrayed to him, her implacable enemy. He reproached her with the death of ten kings, and set her on a camel for three days to be mocked and insulted by the army. The old and fallen queen was then tied to the tail of a horse: the creature was lashed into fury and soon all that remained of the proud queen was a shapeless mass of carrion. The traditional place where Brunehaut met her death is still shown at the corner of the Rue St. HonorÉ and the Rue de l’Arbre Sec. Thierry’s four sons had already been put to death. In 597 her rival Fredegonde, at the height of her prosperity, had died peacefully in bed, full of years, and was buried in the church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des PrÉs) by the side of Chilperic, her husband, and Clothaire II. became sole monarch of the three kingdoms. Amid all this ruin and desolation, when the four angels of the Euphrates seem to have been loosed on Gaul, one force was silently at work knitting up the ravelled ends of the rent fabric of civilisation and tending a lamp which burned with the promise of ideals nobler far than those which fed the ancient faith and polity. The Christian bishops were everywhere filling the empty curule chairs in the cities and provinces of Gaul. At the end of the sixth century society lived in the Church and by the Church, and the sees of the archbishops and bishops corresponded to the Roman administrative divisions. All that was best in the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy was drawn into her bosom, for By the end of the sixth century two hundred and thirty-eight monastic institutions had been founded in Gaul, and from the sixth to the eighth century, eighty-three churches were built. The monasteries were so many nurseries of the industry, knowledge and learning which had not perished in the barbarian invasions; so many cities of refuge from violence and rapine, where the few who thirsted after righteousness and burned with charity might find shelter and protection. “Every letter traced on paper,” said an old abbot, “is a blow to the devil.” The ecclesiastical and monastic schools took the place of the destroyed Roman day-schools, and whatever modicum of learning the Frankish courts could boast of, was due to the monks and nuns of their time; for some at least of these potentates when not absorbed in the gratification of their lusts, their vengeance, greed, or ambition, were possessed by nobler instincts. Brunehaut, nurtured in the more cultured atmosphere of the Visigoth court of Spain, protected commerce and kept the Roman roads Chilperic, whom Gregory of Tours brands as the Herod and Nero of his time, plumed himself on his piety, was concerned at the blasphemies of the Jews, and forced on them conversion or exile at the sword’s point. He composed Latin hymns, and discussed the nature of the Trinity with Gregory and the bishop of Albi. He sought to reform the alphabet by the addition of new letters which corresponded to the guttural sounds in the Frankish tongue, and ordered that the old alphabet should be erased from the children’s books with pumice stone in all the cities of his kingdom, and the reformed alphabet substituted for it. Among the wives of Clothaire I. was the gentle Radegonde, who turned with horror from the bloody scenes of the palace to live in works of charity with the poor and suffering, and in holy communion with priests and bishops. She was at length consecrated a deaconess by St. Medard, donned the habit of a nun, and founded a convent at Poitiers, where the poet Fortunatus had himself ordained a priest that he might be near her. Radegonde’s memory is dear to us in England, for it was a small company of her nuns who settled on the Green Croft by the river bank below Cambridge, and founded a priory whose noble church and monastic buildings were subsequently incorporated in Jesus College when the nunnery was suppressed by Bishop Alcock in 1496.
To St. Germain of Autun, made bishop in 555, Paris owes one of her earliest ecclesiastical foundations. His influence over Childebert, king of Paris, was great. He obtained an order that those who refused to destroy pagan idols in their possession were to answer to the king, and when Childebert and his warriors, seized by an irresistible fighting impulse, marched into Spain, and were bought off the siege and sack of Saragossa by the present of the tunic of St. Vincent, he induced the king to found the abbey and church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des PrÉs), to receive A curious episode is found in Gregory’s Chronicle, which is characteristic of the times, and proves that a monastery and church of St. Julien le Pauvre were already in existence. An impostor, claiming to have the relics of St. Vincent and St. Felix, came to Paris, but refused to deposit them with the bishop for verification. He was arrested and searched, and the so-called relics were found to consist of mole’s teeth, the bones of mice, some bear’s claws and other rubbish. They were flung into the Seine and the impostor was put in prison. Gregory, who was lodging in the monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre, went into the church shortly after midnight to say matins, and found the creature, who had escaped from the bishop’s prison, dead drunk on the pavement. He had him dragged away into a corner, but so intolerable was the stench that the pavement was purified with water and sweet smelling herbs. When the bishops, who were at Paris for a synod, met at dinner the next day, the impostor was identified as a fugitive slave of the bishop of Tarbes. At the end of the sixth century we bid adieu to St. Gregory of Tours, gentlest of annalists. Courageous and independent before kings, he had a pitying heart for the poor and suffering, and bewails the loss of many sweet little babes of Christ, during the plague of 580, whom he had warmed at his breast, carried in his arms, and fed tenderly with his hands. Clothaire II. was a pious king in his way, interested in letters, a munificent patron of the Church, but overfond of the chase and inheriting the savage instincts of his race in dealing with enemies. After quelling a Saxon revolt he is said to have killed all the warriors whose stature exceeded the length of his sword. Dagobert the Great, his son, who succeeded him in 628, was the most enlightened and mightiest of the Merovingian kings. He and his favourite minister, St. Eloy, goldsmith and bishop (founder of the Chaos and misery followed the brilliant reign of Dagobert. In half a century his race had faded into the feeble rois fainÉants, degenerate by precocious debauchery, some of whom were fathers at fourteen or fifteen years of age and in their graves before they were thirty. In an age when human passions are untamed, the one unpardonable vice in a king is weakness, and soon the incapable, impotent and irresolute Merovingians were thrust aside by a more puissant race. |
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