something so courageous and heroic in the act of that single priest
in thus facing a ferocious and determined band, in defence of a
little girl,--for girls were but slightingly regarded in those far-off
days,--that it caught the savage fancy of the cruel king. And this,
joined with his respect for the Church’s right of sanctuary, and with
the lessening of his thirst for blood, now that he had satisfied his
first desire for revenge, led him to desist.
“So be it then,” he said, lowering his threatening sword. “I yield her
to thee, Sir Priest. Look to her welfare and thine own. Surely a girl
can do no harm.”
But King Gundebald and his house lived to learn how far wrong was that
unguarded statement. For the very lowering of the murderous sword that
thus brought life to the little Princess Clotilda meant the downfall of
the kingdom of Burgundy and the rise of the great and victorious nation
of France. The memories of even a little maid of ten are not easily
blotted out.
Her sister, Sedelenda, had found refuge and safety in the convent of
Ainay, near at hand, and there, too, Clotilda would have gone, but her
uncle, the new king, said: “No, the maidens must be forever separated.”
He expressed a willingness, however, to have the Princess Clotilda
brought up in his palace, which had been her father’s, and requested
the priest Ugo of Rheims to remain awhile, and look after the girl’s
education. In those days a king’s request was a command, and the good
Ugo, though stern and brave in the face of real danger, was shrewd
enough to know that it was best for him to yield to the king’s wishes.
So he continued in the palace of the king, looking after the welfare
of his little charge, until suddenly the girl took matters into her own
hands, and decided his future and her own.
The kingdom of Burgundy, in the days of the Princess Clotilda, was
a large tract of country now embraced by Southern France and Western
Switzerland. It had been given over by the Romans to the Goths, who had
invaded it in the year 413. It was a land of forest and vineyards,
of fair valleys and sheltered hill-sides, and of busy cities that the
fostering hand of Rome had beautified; while through its broad domain
the Rhone, pure and sparkling, swept with a rapid current from Swiss
lake and glacier, southward to the broad and beautiful Mediterranean.
Lyons was its capital, and on the hill of Fourviere, overlooking the
city below it, rose the marble palace of the Burgundian kings, near to
the spot where, to-day, the ruined forum of the old Roman days is still
shown to tourists.
It had been a palace for centuries. Roman governors of “Imperial Gaul”
had made it their head-quarters and their home; three Roman emperors had
cooed and cried as babies within its walls; and it had witnessed also
many a feast and foray, and the changing fortunes of Roman, Gallic, and
Burgundian conquerors and over-lords. But it was no longer “home” to the
little Princess Clotilda. She thought of her father and mother, and of
her brothers, the little princes with whom she had played in this very
palace, as it now seemed to her, so many years ago. And the more she
feared her cruel uncle, the more did she desire to go far, far away from
his presence. So, after thinking the whole matter over, as little girls
of ten can sometimes think, she told her good friend Ugo, the priest,
of her father’s youngest brother Godegesil, who ruled the dependent
principality of Geneva, far up the valley of the Rhone.
“Yes, child, I know the place,” said Ugo. “A fair city indeed, on the
blue and beautiful Lake Lemanus, walled in by mountains, and rich in
corn and vineyards.”
“Then let us fly thither,” said the girl. “My uncle Godegesil I know
will succor us, and I shall be freed from my fears of King Gundebald.”
Though it seemed at first to the good priest only a child’s desire, he
learned to think better of it when he saw how unhappy the poor girl was
in the hated palace, and how slight were her chances for improvement.
And so, one fair spring morning in the year 486, the two slipped quietly
out of the palace; and by slow and cautious stages, with help from
friendly priests and nuns, and frequent rides in the heavy ox-wagons
that were the only means of transport other than horseback, they finally
reached the old city of Geneva.
And on the journey, the good Ugo had made the road seem less weary, and
the lumbering ox-wagons less jolty and painful, by telling his
bright young charge of all the wonders and relics he had seen in his
journeyings in the East; but especially did the girl love to hear him
tell of the boy king of the Franks, Hlodo-wig, or Clovis, who lived in
the priest’s own boyhood home of Tournay, in far-off Belgium, and who,
though so brave and daring, was still a pagan, when all the world was
fast becoming Christian. And as Clotilda listened, she wished that she
could turn this brave young chief away from his heathen deities, Thor
and Odin, to the worship of the Christians’ God; and, revolving strange
fancies in her mind, she determined what she would do when she “grew
up,”--as many a girl since her day has determined. But even as they
reached the fair city of Geneva--then half Roman, half Gallic, in its
buildings and its life--the wonderful news met them how this boy-king
Clovis, sending a challenge to combat to the prefect Syagrius, the last
of the Roman governors, had defeated him in a battle at Soissons, and
broken forever the power of Rome in Gaul.
War, which is never any thing but terrible, was doubly so in those
savage days, and the plunder of the captured cities and homesteads
was the chief return for which the barbarian soldiers followed their
leaders. But when the Princess Clotilda heard how, even in the midst of
his burning and plundering, the young Frankish chief spared some of the
fairest Christian churches, he became still more her hero; and again the
desire to convert him from paganism and to revenge her father’s murder
took shape in her mind. For, devout and good though she was,
this excellent little maiden of the year 485 was by no means the
gentle-hearted girl of 1888, and, like most of the world about her, had
but two desires: to become a good church-helper, and to be revenged on
her enemies. Certainly, fourteen centuries of progress and education
have made us more loving and less vindictive.
But now that the good priest Ugo of Rheims saw that his own home land
was in trouble, he felt that there lay his duty. And Godegesil, the
under-king of Geneva, feeling uneasy alike from the nearness of this
boy conqueror and the possible displeasure of his brother and over-lord,
King Gundebald, declined longer to shelter his niece in his palace at
Geneva.
“And why may I not go with you?” the girl asked of Ugo; but the old
priest knew that a conquered and plundered land was no place to which
to convey a young maid for safety, and the princess, therefore, found
refuge among the sisters of the church of St. Peter in Geneva. And here
she passed her girlhood, as the record says, “in works of piety and
charity.”
So four more years went by. In the north, the boy chieftain, reaching
manhood, had been raised aloft on the shields of his fair-haired and
long-limbed followers, and with many a “hael!” and shout had been
proclaimed “King of the Franks.” In the south, the young Princess
Clotilda, now nearly sixteen, had washed the feet of pilgrims,
ministered to the poor, and, after the manner of her day, had proved
herself a zealous church-worker in that low-roofed convent near the
old church of St. Peter, high on that same hill in Geneva where to-day,
hemmed in by narrow streets and tall houses, the cathedral of St. Peter,
twice rebuilded since Clotilda’s time, overlooks the quaint city, the
beautiful lake of Geneva, and the rushing Rhone, and sees across the
valley of the Arve the gray and barren rocks of the Petit Seleve and the
distant snows of Mont Blanc.
One bright summer day, as the young princess passed into the hospitium,
or guest-room for poor pilgrims, attached to the convent, she saw there
a stranger, dressed in rags. He had the wallet and staff of a mendicant,
or begging pilgrim, and, coming toward her, he asked for “charity in the
name of the blessed St. Peter, whose church thou servest.”
The young girl brought the pilgrim food, and then, according to the
custom of the day, kneeling on the earthen floor, she began to bathe
his feet. But as she did so, the pilgrim, bending forward, said in a low
voice:
“Lady, I have great matters to announce to thee, if thou deign to permit
me to reveal them.”
Pilgrims in those days were frequently made the bearers of special
messages between distant friends; but this poor young orphan
princess could think of no one from whom a message to her might come,
Nevertheless, she simply said: “Say on.” In the same low tone the beggar
continued, “Clovis, King of the Franks, sends thee greeting.”
The girl looked up now, thoroughly surprised. This beggar must be
a madman, she thought. But the eyes of the pilgrim looked at her
reassuringly, and he said: “In token whereof, he sendeth thee this ring
by me, his confidant and comitatus,(1) Aurelian of Soissons.”
(1) One of the king’s special body-guard, from which comes the title
comp, count.
The Princess Clotilda took, as if in a dream, the ring of transparent
jacinth set in solid gold, and asked quietly:
“What would the king of the Franks with me?”
“The king, my master, hath heard from the holy Bishop Remi and the
good priest Ugo of thy beauty and discreetness,” replied Aurelian; “and
likewise of the sad condition of one who is the daughter of a royal
line. He bade me use all my wit to come nigh to thee, and to say that,
if it be the will of the gods, he would fain raise thee to his rank by
marriage.”
Those were days of swift and sudden surprises, when kings made up their
minds in royal haste, and princesses were not expected to be surprised
at whatever they might hear. And so we must not feel surprised to learn
that all the dreams of her younger days came into the girl’s mind, and
that, as the record states, “she accepted the ring with great joy.”
“Return promptly to thy lord,” she said to the messenger, “and bid him,
if he would fain unite me to him in marriage, to send messengers without
delay to demand me of my uncle, King Gundebald, and let those same
messengers take me away in haste, so soon as they shall have obtained
permission.”
For this wise young princess knew that her uncle’s word was not to be
long depended upon, and she feared, too, that certain advisers at her
uncle’s court might counsel him to do her harm before the messengers of
King Clovis could have conducted her beyond the borders of Burgundy.
Aurelian, still in his pilgrim’s disguise, for he feared discovery in a
hostile country, hastened back to King Clovis, who, the record says, was
“pleased with his success and with Clotilda’s notion, and at once sent a
deputation to Gundebald to demand his niece in marriage.”
As Clotilda foresaw, her uncle stood in too much dread of this fierce
young conqueror of the north to say him nay. And soon in the palace at
Lyons, so full of terrible memories to this orphan girl, the courteous
Aurelian, now no longer in beggar’s rags, but gorgeous in white silk and
a flowing sagum, or mantle of vermilion, publicly engaged himself,
as the representative of King Clovis, to the Princess Clotilda; and,
according to the curious custom of the time, cemented the engagement by
giving to the young girl a sou and a denier.(1)
(1) Two pieces of old French coin, equalling about a cent and a mill in
American money.
“Now deliver the princess into our hand, O king,” said the messenger,
“that we may take her to King Clovis, who waiteth for us even now at
Chalons to conclude these nuptials.”
So, almost before he knew what he was doing, King Gundebald had bidden
his niece farewell; and the princess, with her escort of Frankish
spears, was rumbling away in a clumsy basterne, or covered ox-wagon,
toward the frontier of Burgundy.
But the slow-moving ox-wagon by no means suited the impatience of this
shrewd young princess. She knew her uncle, the king of Burgundy, too
well. When once he was roused to action, he was fierce and furious.
“Good Aurelian,” she said at length to the king’s ambassador, who rode
by her side: “if that thou wouldst take me into the presence of thy
lord, the king of the Franks, let me descend from this carriage, mount
me on horseback, and let us speed hence as fast as we may, for never in
this carriage shall I reach the presence of my lord, the king.”
And none too soon was her advice acted, upon for, the counsellors of
King Gundebald, noticing Clotilda’s anxiety to be gone, concluded that,
after all, they had made a mistake in betrothing her to King Clovis.
“Thou shouldst have remembered, my lord,” they said, “that thou didst
slay Clotilda’s father, her mother, and the young princes, her brothers.
If Clotilda become powerful, be sure she will avenge the wrong thou hast
wrought her.”
And forthwith the king sent off an armed band, with orders to bring back
both the princess and the treasure he had sent with her as her marriage
portion. But already the princess and her escort were safely across the
Seine, where, in the Campania, or plain-country,--later known as the
province of Champagne--she met the king of the Franks.
I am sorry to be obliged to confess that the first recorded desire of
this beautiful, brave, and devout young maiden, when she found herself
safely among the fierce followers of King Clovis, was a request for
vengeance. But we must remember, girls and boys, that this is a story of
half-savage days when, as I have already said, the desire for revenge on
one’s enemies was common to all.
From the midst of his skin-clad and green-robed guards and nobles, young
Clovis--in a dress of “crimson and gold, and milk-white silk,” and
with his yellow hair coiled in a great top-knot on his uncovered
head--advanced to meet his bride.
“My lord king,” said Clotilda, “the bands of the king of Burgundy
follow hard upon us to bear me off. Command, I pray thee, that these,
my escort, scatter themselves right and left for twoscore miles, and
plunder and burn the lands of the king of Burgundy.”
Probably in no other way could this wise young girl of seventeen have so
thoroughly pleased the fierce and warlike young king. He gladly ordered
her wishes to be carried out, and the plunderers forthwith departed to
carry out the royal command.
So her troubles were ended, and this prince and princess,--Hlodo-wig,
or Clovis (meaning the “warrior youth”), and Hlodo-hilde, or Clotilda
(meaning the “brilliant and noble maid”),--in spite of the wicked uncle
Gundebald, were married at Soissons, in the year 493, and, as the fairy
stories say, “lived happily together ever after.”
The record of their later years has no place in this sketch of the
girlhood of Clotilda; but it is one of the most interesting and dramatic
of the old-time historic stories. The dream of that sad little princess
in the old convent at Geneva, “to make her boy-hero a Christian, and to
be revenged on the murderer of her parents,” was in time fulfilled. For
on Christmas-day, in the year 493, the young king and three thousand of
his followers were baptized amid gorgeous ceremonial in the great church
of St. Martin at Rheims.
The story of the young queen’s revenge is not to be told in these pages.
But, though terrible, it is only one among the many tales of vengeance
that show us what fierce and cruel folk our ancestors were, in the days
when passion instead of love ruled the hearts of men and women, and
of boys and girls as well; and how favored are we of this nineteenth
century, in all the peace and prosperity and home happiness that
surround us.
But from this conversion, as also from this revenge, came the great
power of Clovis and Clotilda; for, ere his death, in the year 511, he
brought all the land under his sway from the Rhine to the Rhone, the
ocean and the Pyrenees; he was hailed by his people with the old Roman
titles of Consul and Augustus, and reigned victorious as the first king
of France. Clotilda, after years of wise counsel and charitable works,
upon which her determination for revenge seems to be the only stain,
died long after her husband, in the year 545, and to-day, in the city of
Paris, which was even then the capital of new France, the church of St.
Clotilda stands as her memorial, while her marble statue may be seen by
the traveller in the great palace of the Luxembourg.
A typical girl of those harsh old days of the long ago,--loving
and generous toward her friends, unforgiving and revengeful to her
enemies,--reared in the midst of cruelty and of charity, she did her
duty according to the light given her, made France a Christian nation,
and so helped on the progress of civilization. Certainly a place among
the world’s historic girls may rightly be accorded to this fair-haired
young princess of the summer-land of France, the beautiful Clotilda of
Burgundy.
WOO OF HWANG-HO.: THE GIRL OF THE YELLOW RIVER.
(Afterwards the Great Empress Woo of China.) A.D. 635.
Thomas the Nestorian had been in many lands and in the midst of many
dangers, but he had never before found himself in quite so
unpleasant a position as now. Six ugly Tartar horsemen with very
uncomfortable-looking spears and appalling shouts, and mounted on their
swift Kirghiz ponies, were charging down upon him, while neither the
rushing Yellow River on the right hand, nor the steep dirt-cliffs on the
left, could offer him shelter or means of escape. These dirt-cliffs,
or “loess,” to give them their scientific name, are remarkable banks of
brownish-yellow loam, found largely in Northern and Western China, and
rising sometimes to a height of a thousand feet. Their peculiar yellow
tinge makes every thing look “hwang” or yellow,--and hence yellow is
a favorite color among the Chinese. So, for instance, the emperor is
“Hwang-ti”--the “Lord of the Yellow Land”; the imperial throne is the
“Hwang-wei” or “yellow throne” of China; the great river, formerly
spelled in your school geographies Hoang-ho, is “Hwang-ho,” the “yellow
river,” etc.
These “hwang” cliffs, or dirt-cliffs, are full of caves and crevices,
but the good priest could see no convenient cave, and he had therefore
no alternative but to boldly face his fate, and like a brave man calmly
meet what he could not avoid.
But, just as he had singled out, as his probable captor, one peculiarly
unattractive-looking horseman, whose crimson sheepskin coat and long
horsetail plume were streaming in the wind, and just as he had braced
himself to meet the onset against the great “loess,” or dirt-cliff, he
felt a twitch at his black upper robe, and a low voice--a girl’s, he was
confident--said quickly:
“Look not before nor behind thee, good O-lopun, but trust to my word and
give a backward leap.”
Thomas the Nestorian had learned two valuable lessons in his much
wandering about the earth,--never to appear surprised, and always to be
ready to act quickly. So, knowing nothing of the possible results of
his action, but feeling that it could scarcely be worse than death from
Tartar spears, he leaped back, as bidden.
The next instant, he found himself flat upon his back in one of the
low-ceiled cliff caves that abound in Western China, while the screen
of vines that had concealed its entrance still quivered from his fall.
Picking himself up and breathing a prayer of thanks for his deliverance,
he peered through the leafy doorway and beheld in surprise six much
astonished Tartar robbers regarding with looks of puzzled wonder a
defiant little Chinese girl, who had evidently darted out of the cave as
he had tumbled in. She was facing the enemy as boldly as had he, and
her little almond eyes fairly danced with mischievous delight at their
perplexity.
At once he recognized the child. She was Woo (the “high-spirited” or
“dauntless one”), the bright young girl whom he had often noticed in the
throng at his mission-house in Tung-Chow,--the little city by the Yellow
River, where her father, the bannerman, held guard at the Dragon Gate.
He was about to call out to the girl to save herself, when, with a
sudden swoop, the Tartar whom he had braced himself to resist, bent
in his saddle and made a dash for the child. But agile little, Woo
was quicker than the Tartar horseman. With a nimble turn and a sudden
spring, she dodged the Tartar’s hand, darted under his pony’s legs,
and with a shrill laugh of derision, sprang up the sharp incline, and
disappeared in one of the many cliff caves before the now doubly baffled
horsemen could see what had become of her.
With a grunt of discomfiture and disgust, the Tartar riders turned their
ponies’ heads and galloped off along the road that skirted the yellow
waters of the swift-flowing Hwang-ho. Then a little yellow face peeped
out of a cave farther up the cliff, a black-haired, tightly braided head
bobbed and twitched with delight, and the next moment the good priest
was heartily thanking his small ally for so skilfully saving him from
threatened capture.
It was a cool September morning in the days of the great Emperor Tai,
twelve hundred and fifty years ago. And a great emperor was Tai-tsung,
though few, if any, of my young readers ever heard his name. His
splendid palace stood in the midst of lovely gardens in the great city
of Chang-an,--that old, old city that for over two thousand years was
the capital of China, and which you can now find in your geographies
under its modern name of Singan-foo. And in the year 635, when our
story opens, the name of Tai-tsung was great and powerful throughout the
length and breadth of Chung Kwoh--the “Middle Kingdom,” as the Chinese
for nearly thirty centuries have called their vast country--while the
stories of his fame and power had reached to the western courts of India
and of Persia, of Constantinople, and even of distant Rome.
It was a time of darkness and strife in Europe. Already what historians
have called the Dark Ages had settled upon the Christian world. And
among all the races of men the only nation that was civilized, and
learned, and cultivated, and refined in this seventh century of the
Christian era, was this far eastern Empire of China, where schools and
learning flourished, and arts and manufactures abounded, when America
was as yet undiscovered and Europe was sunk in degradation.
And here, since the year 505, the Nestorians, a branch of the Christian
Church, originating in Asia Minor in the fifth century, and often called
“the Protestants of the East,” had been spreading the story of the life
and love of Christ. And here, in this year of grace 635, in the city of
Chang-an, and in all the region about the Yellow River, the good priest
Thomas the Nestorian, whom the Chinese called O-lo-pun--the nearest
approach they could give to his strange Syriac name--had his Christian
mission-house, and was zealously bringing to the knowledge of a great
and enlightened people the still greater and more helpful light of
Christianity.
“My daughter,” said the Nestorian after his words of thanks were
uttered; “this is a gracious deed done to me, and one that I may not
easily repay. Yet would I gladly do so, if I might. Tell me what wouldst
thou like above all other things?”
The answer of the girl was as ready as it was unexpected.
“To be a boy, O master!” she replied. “Let the great Shang-ti,(1) whose
might thou teachest, make me a man that I may have revenge.”
(1) Almighty Being.
The good priest had found strange things in his mission work in this
far Eastern land, but this wrathful demand of an excited little maid was
full as strange as any. For China is and ever has been a land in which
the chief things taught the children are, “subordination, passive
submission to the law, to parents, and to all superiors, and a peaceful
demeanor.”