THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS--ST. GENEVIEVE--THE CONVERSION OF CLOVIS--THE
MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY
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._"[17]
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.[18] For centuries the Gauls had
been untrained in arms and habituated to look to the imperial legions
for defence against the half-savage races of men, giants in stature and
strength, surging like an angry sea against their boundaries. Towards
the end of the fourth century Vandals and Burgundians, Suevi and
Alemanni, Goth and Hun, treading on each other's heels, burst through
the Rhine frontier, destroyed the Roman garrisons and forts, and
inundated Gaul. Two of these races stayed to form kingdoms: the
Burgundians in the fertile plains of the Rhine; the Visigoths in
Aquitaine and North Spain, whose aid the Romans were fain to seek to
roll back the hordes of Attila's Huns at Chalons-sur-Marne. This was the
last achievement of Roman arms in Gaul, and even that victory was
largely due to the courage of the Goths. In the fifth century the
confederation of Frankish tribes who had conquered and settled in
Belgium saw successive waves of invasion pass by, and determined to have
their part in the spoils of Gaul. They soon overran Flanders and the
north, and at length under Clovis captured Paris and conquered nearly
the whole of Gaul.
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 accorded to him. His warriors answered: "All, glorious king,
is thine." But before the king could grasp the vase, one, jealous and
angry, threw his _francisque_[19] at it, exclaiming: "Thou shalt have no
more than falls to thy lot." The broken vase was however apportioned to
the king, who restored it to the bishop. But Clovis hid the wound in his
heart. At the annual review in the Champ de Mars near Paris, the king
strode along the line inspecting the weapons of his warriors. He stopped
in front of the uncourtly soldier, took his axe from him, complained of
its foul state, and flung it angrily on the ground. As the man stooped
to pick it up Clovis, with his own axe, cleft his skull in twain,
exclaiming: "Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons." "Even so," says
Gregory quaintly, "did he inspire all with great fear."
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.
[Illustration: TOWER OF CLOVIS.]
"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 works of pity, for she knew
well that she was none other in this world but a pilgrim passing."
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,[20] which reached thirty feet
above the high altar, was confiscated by the Revolutionists to pay their
armies, and what remains of her relics is now treasured in the
neighbouring church of St. Etienne du Mont.
The conversion of Clovis is the capital fact of early French history.
His queen Clotilde, niece of the Burgundian king, had long[21]
importuned him to declare himself a Christian. He had consented to the
baptism of their firstborn, but the infant's death within a week seemed
an admonition from his own jealous gods. A second son, however,
recovered from grievous sickness at his wife's prayers and this, aided
perhaps by a shrewd insight into the trend of events, induced him to
lend a more willing ear to the teachers of the new Faith. In 496 the
Franks were at death grapple with their German foes at Tolbiac. Clovis,
when the fight went against him, invoked the God of the Christians and
prayed to be delivered from his enemies. His cry was heard and the
advent of the new Lord of Battles was winged with victory.
There was a stirring scene that Christmas at Rheims, when Clovis with
his two sisters and three thousand of his warriors marched through the
streets, all hung with cloth of many colours, into the cathedral which
was glittering with innumerable candles and perfumed with incense of
divine odour. Clovis was the first to be baptised. "Bend thy neck,
gentle Sicamber," cried St. Rémi. "Adore what thou didst burn: burn what
thou didst adore." When the bishop was reading the Gospel story of the
Passion, the king, thrilled with indignation, cried out: "Ah! had I been
there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ."
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[22] dynasty a tale of
cruelty and treachery whose every page is stained with blood.
[Illustration: BOIS DE BOULOGNE--LAC SUPÉRIEUR]
In the ninth century a story was current among the people of France
which admirably symbolises the fate of the dynasty. One night as
Childeric, father of Clovis, lay by the side of Basine, his wife, she
awoke him and said, "Arise, O king, look in the courtyard of thy
dwelling and tell thy servant what thou shalt see." Childeric arose and
saw beasts pass by that seemed like unto lions, unicorns and leopards.
He returned to his wife and told her what he had seen. And Basine said
to him: "Master, go once again and tell thy servant what thou shalt
see." Childeric went forth anew and saw beasts passing by like unto
bears and wolves. Having related this to his wife she bade him go forth
yet a third time. He now saw dogs and other baser animals rending each
other to pieces. Then said Basine to Childeric: "What thou hast seen
with thine eyes shall verily come to pass. A son shall be born to us who
will be a lion for courage: the sons of our sons shall be like unto
leopards and unicorns: they in their turn shall bring forth children
like unto bears and wolves for their voracity. The last of those whom
thou sawest shall come for the end and destruction of the kingdom."
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
raised to the throne, I would rather see them dead than shorn." The
messenger waited to hear no more and hastened back to the two kings.
Clothaire then seized the elder of the children and stabbed him under
the armpit. The younger, at the sight of his brother's blood, flung
himself at Childebert's feet, burst into tears, and cried: "Help me,
dear father, let me not die even as my brother." Childebert's heart was
softened and he begged for the child's life. Clothaire's only answer was
a volley of insults and a threat of death if he protected the victim.
Childebert then disintwined the child's tender arms clasping his
knees--he was but six years of age--and pushed him to his brother, who
drove a dagger into his breast. The tutors and servants of the children
were then butchered, and Clothaire rode calmly to his palace, to become
at his brother's death, in 558, sole king of the Franks. The third
child, Clodoald, owing to the devotion of faithful servants escaped, and
was hidden for some time in Provence. Later in life he returned to Paris
and built a monastery at a place still known by his name (St. Cloud)
about two leagues from the city.
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 were cast
into a peasant's hut which was set on fire and all perished in the
flames. Next year the king took cold while hunting near Compiègne, fell
sick of a fever and died.
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 digging for his
brother would swallow him too. It was of no avail. He marched to Vitry
and was proclaimed king of Neustria. After the proclamation two
messengers desired to see him. As he stood between them listening to
their suit he was stabbed on either side by two long poisoned knives:
the assassins had been sent by Fredegonde. Chilperic now hastened to
Paris and seized the royal treasure. Brunehaut's son, Childebert II., a
child of five, was, however, stolen away from the palace in a basket by
one of Siegbert's faithful servants and proclaimed king by the warriors.
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[23]
he said: 'Seest thou not what I perceive above this roof?' I answered,
'I see only a second building which the king has had built.' He asked
again, 'Seest thou naught else?' I weened he spoke in jest and did but
answer--'If thou seest aught else, prithee show it unto me.' Then
uttering a deep sigh, he said: 'I see the sword of God's wrath suspended
over this house.'" Shortly after this conversation Chilperic having
returned from the chase to his royal villa of Chelles, was leaning on
the shoulder of one of his companions to descend from his horse, when
Landeric, servant of Fredegonde, stabbed him to death.
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.
[Illustration: RUE ST. JACQUES.]
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 she was the one
power making for unity and good government. From one end of the land to
the other the bishops visited and corresponded with each other. They
alone had communion of ideas, common sentiments and common interests.
St. Gregory, bishop of Tours, was the son of a senator; St. Germain of
Auxerre was a man of noble lineage, who had already exercised high
public functions before he was made a bishop. St. Germain of Autun was
ever on the move, now in Brittany, now at Paris, now at Arles, to crush
heresy, to threaten a barbarian potentate, or to sear the conscience
and, if need were, ban the person of a guilty Christian king. The bishop
of Trèves, seeing the horses of some royal Frankish envoys grazing in
the wheat-fields of the peasants, threatened to excommunicate them if
they spoiled the substance of the poor, and himself drove the horses
away.
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[24] in
repair, founded monasteries and corresponded with Gregory the Great, who
commended to her care the safety of his missionaries passing through
her dominions to convert the Angles across the straits.
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.
[Illustration: ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS.]
[Illustration: ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE.]
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 the relic. In Childebert's reign was begun on the
site of the present Cathedral of Notre Dame a splendid basilica, so
magnificently decorated that it was compared to Solomon's Temple for the
beauty and the delicacy of its art. During this great outburst of zeal
and devotion another monastery was established and dedicated to St.
Vincent, which subsequently became associated with the name of the
earlier St. Germain of Auxerre (l'Auxerrois).
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 convent which long bore his name),
are enshrined in the hearts of the people in many a song and
ballad:--St. Eloy, with his good humour, his happy countenance, his
eloquence, gentleness, modesty, wit, and wide charity; Dagobert, the
Solomon of the Franks, the terror of the oppressor, the darling of the
poor. The great king was fond of Paris and established himself there
when not scouring his kingdom to administer justice or to crush his
enemies. He was the second founder of the monastery of St. Denis, which
he rebuilt and endowed, and to which he gave much importance by the
establishment there of a great fair, which soon drew merchants from all
parts of Europe. He was a patron of the arts and employed St. Eloy to
make reliquaries[25] for the churches in Paris of such richness and
beauty that they were admired of the whole of France.
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.[26]
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.