 CHAPTER XI. What Charlemagne was in his wars and his general relations with his nation has just been seen. He shall now be exhibited in all his administrative activity and his intellectual life as a legislator and as a friend to the human mind. The same man will be recognized in every case. He will grow in greatness without changing as he appears under his various aspects. They are often joined together under the title of capitularies, capitula, small chapters, articles, a mass of acts, very different in point of date in objects, which are attributed indiscriminately to Charlemagne. This is a mistake. The capitularies are the laws or legislative measures of the Frankish kings, Merrovingian as well as Carlovingian. Those of the Merrovingians are few in number and of slight importance, and amongst those of the Carlovingians, which amount to 152, 65 are only due to Charlemagne. When an attempt is made to classify these last according to their object, it is impossible not to be struck with their incoherent variety, and several of them are such as we should nowadays be surprised to meet with in a code or in a special law. Amongst Charlemagne's 65 capitularies, which contain 1,151 articles, may be counted 87 of moral, 293 of political, 130 of penal, 110 of civil, 85 of religious, 305 of canonical, 73 of domestic, and 12 of incidental legislation. And it must not be supposed that all these articles are really acts of legislation, laws, properly so-called. We find amongst them the texts of ancient national laws revised and promulgated afresh, extracts from and additions to these same ancient laws, Sal, Lombard, and Bavarian, extracts from acts of councils, instructions given by Charlemagne to his envoys in the provinces, questions that he proposed to put to the bishops or counts when they came to the National Assembly, answers given by Charlemagne to questions addressed to him by the bishops, or commissioners, Misi Domenici, judgments, decrees, royal pardons, and simple notes that Charlemagne seems to have written down for himself alone to remind him of what he proposed to do, in a word, nearly all the various acts which could possibly have to be framed by an earnest, far-sighted and active government. Often indeed these capitularies have no imperative or prohibitive character, they are simple councils, purely moral precepts. We read therein, for example, covetousness doth consist in desiring that which others possess, and in giving away not of that which one's self possesseth, according to the Apostle it is the root of all evil, and hospitality must be practiced. The capitularies which have been classed under the heads of political, penal, and canonical legislation are the most numerous, and are those which bear most decidedly an imperative or prohibitive stamp. Amongst them a prominent place is held by measures of political economy, administration, and police. You will find therein an attempt to put a fixed price on provisions, a real trial of a maximum for cereals, a prohibition of mendicity, with the following clause, if such mendicans be met with, and they labor not with their hands, let none take thought about giving unto them. The interior police of the palace is regulated thereby, as well as that of the empire. We do will and decree that none of those who serve in our palace shall take leave to receive therein any man who seeketh refuge there, and cometh to hide there, by reason of theft, homicide, adultery, or any other crime. That if any free man do break through our interdicts, and hide such a malifactor in our palace, he shall be bound to carry him on his shoulders to the public quarter, and there be tied to the same stake as the malifactor. Certain capitularies have been termed religious legislation in contradistinction to canonical legislation, because they are really admonitions, religious exhortations, addressed not to the ecclesiastics alone, but to the faithful, the Christian people in general, and notably characterized by good sense, and one might almost say, freedom of thought. For example, beware of venerating the names of martyrs falsely so called, in the memory of dubious saints. Let none suppose that prayer cannot be made to God save in three tongues, probably Latin, Greek, and Germanic, or perhaps the vulgar tongue, for the last was really beginning to take form. For God alone is adored in all tongues, and man is heard if he do but ask for the things that be right. These details are put forward that a proper idea may be obtained of Charlemagne as a legislator, and of what are called his laws. We have here it will be seen no ordinary legislator and no ordinary laws. We see the work with infinite variations and in disconnect form of a prodigiously energetic and watchful master who had to think and provide for everything, who had to be everywhere the moving and the regulating spirit. This universal and untiring energy is the grand characteristic of Charlemagne's government, and was perhaps what made his superiority most incontestable and his power most efficient. It is noticeable that the majority of Charlemagne's capitularies belonged to that epoch of his reign when he was emperor of the West, when he was invested with all the splendor of sovereign power. Of the sixty-five capitularies classed under different heads, thirteen only are previous to the twenty-fifth of December eight hundred, the date of his coronation as emperor at Rome. Fifty-two are comprised between the years 801 and 804. The energy of Charlemagne as a warrior and a politician, having thus been exhibited, it remains to say a few words about his intellectual energy. For that is by no means the least original or least grand feature of his character and his influence. Modern times and civilized society have more than once seen despotic sovereigns filled with distrust towards scholars of exalted intellect, especially such as cultivated the moral and political sciences and a little inclined to admit them to their favor or to public office. There is no knowing whether, in our days, with our freedom of thought and of the press, Charlemagne would have been a stranger to this feeling of antipathy. But what is certain is that in his day, in the midst of a barbaric society, there was no inducement to it, and that by nature he was not disposed to it. His power was not in any respect questioned, distinguished intellects were very rare, Charlemagne had too much need of their services to fear their criticisms, and they on their part were more anxious to second his efforts than to show towards him anything like exaction or independence. He gave reign, therefore, without any embarrassment or misgiving, to his spontaneous inclination towards them, their studies, their labors and their influence. He drew them into the management of affairs. In Guizot's history of civilization in France there is a list of the names and works of twenty-three men of the eighth and ninth centuries who have escaped oblivion, and they are all found grouped about Charlemagne as his own habitual advisors, or assisted by him as advisors to his sons Pepin and Louis in Italy and Aquitania, or sent by him to all points of his empire as commissioners, Misi Domnici, or charged in his name with important negotiations. And those whom he did not employ at a distance formed in his immediate neighborhood a learned and industrious society, a school of the palace, according to some modern commentators, but an academy, and not a school, according to others, devoted rather to conversation than to teaching. It probably fulfilled both missions. It attended Charlemagne at his various residences, at one time working for him at questions he invited them to deal with, at another giving the regular components of his court to his children and to himself lessons in the different sciences called liberal, grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, geometry, and even theology, and the great religious problems it was beginning to discuss. Two men, Alcune and Eganhard, have remained justly celebrated in the literary history of the age. Alcune was the principal director of the school of the palace and the favorite, the confidant, the learned advisor of Charlemagne. If your zeal were imitated, said he one day to the emperor, perchance one might see arise in France a new Athens, far more glorious than the ancient, the Athens of Christ. Eganhard, who was younger, received his scientific education in the school of the palace and was head of the public works to Charlemagne, therefore becoming his biographer and at a later period the intimate advisor of his son Louis the Debonair. Other scholars of the school of the palace, Engelbert, Ledred, Adelhard, Agobard, Theodolph, were abbots of Saint-Requiet or Corby, Archbishop of Lyon and bishops of Orléans. They had all assumed in the school itself names illustrious in pagan antiquity. Alcune called himself Fliens, Engelbert, Homer, Theodolph, Pender. Charlemagne himself had been pleased to take, in their society, a great name of old, but he had borrowed from the history of the Hebrews. He called himself David, and Eganhard, animated no doubt by the same sentiments, was Bezeliel, that nephew of Moses to whom God had granted the gift of knowing how to work skillfully in wood and all the materials which served to the construction of the Ark and the Tabernacle. Either in the lifetime of their royal patron or after his death all these scholars became great dignitaries of the church or ended their lives in monasteries of note, but so long as they lived they served Charlemagne or his sons not only with the devotion of faithful advisors but also as followers proud of the master who had known how to do the moner by making use of them. It was without effort and by natural sympathy that Charlemagne had inspired them with such sentiments, for he too really loved sciences, literature, and such studies as were then possible, and he cultivated them on his own account for his own pleasure as a sort of conquest. It has been doubted whether he could write and an expression of Eganhard's might authorize such a doubt, but according to other evidence and even according to the passage in Eganhard one is inclined to believe merely that Charlemagne strove painfully and without much success to write a good hand. He had learned Latin and he understood Greek. He caused to be commenced and perhaps himself commenced the drawing up of the first Germanic grammar. He ordered that the old barbaric poems in which the deeds and wars of the ancient kings were celebrated should be collected for posterity. He gave Germanic names to the twelve months of the year. He distinguished the wins by twelve special terms, whereas before his time they had but four designations. He paid great attention to astronomy. Being troubled one day at no longer seeing in the firmament one of the known planets, he wrote to Alcuin, What thinkest thou of the smars, which last year, being concealed in the sign of cancer, was intercepted from the sight of men by the light of the sun? Is it the regular course of his revolution? Is it the influence of the sun? Is it a miracle? Could he have been two years about performing the course of a single one? In theological studies and discussions he exhibited a particular engrave interest. It is to him, say M. M. Ampere and Herot, that we must refer the honour of the decision taken in 794 by the Council of Frankfurt in the great dispute about images. A temperate decision, which is as far removed from the infatuation of the image worshippers as from the frenzy of the image-breakers, and at the same time that he thus took part in the great ecclesiastical questions, Charlemagne paid zealous attention to the instruction of the clergy whose ignorance he deplored. Ah! said he one day, If only I had about me a dozen clerics learned in all the sciences, as Jerome and Augustine were. With all his poisons it was not in his power to make Jerome's and Augustine's, but he laid the foundation in the cathedral churches and great monasteries of episcopal and cloisteral schools for the education of ecclesiastics, and carrying his solicitude still farther, he recommended to the bishops and abbots that, in those schools, they should take care to make no difference between the sons of serfs and of free men, so that they might come and sit on the same benches to study grammar, music, and arithmetic. Capitularies of 789, article 70. Thus in the eighth century he foreshadowed the extension which, in the nineteenth, was to be accorded to primary instruction, to the advantage and honor not only of the clergy, but also of the whole people. After so much of war and toil at a distance, Charlemagne was now at Ex-La-Chapelle, finding rest in this work a peaceful civilization. He was embellishing the capital which he had found, and which was called the King's Court. He had built there a grand basilica, magnificently adorned. He was completing his own palace there. He fetched from Italy clerics skilled in church music, a pious joyance to which he was much devoted, and which he recommended to the bishops of his empire. In the outskirts of Ex-La-Chapelle he gave full scope, said Eganhard, to his delight in riding and hunting. Baths of naturally tepid water gave him great pleasure. Being passionately fond of swimming, he became so dexterous that none could be compared with him. He invited not only his sons, but also his friends, the grandees of his court, and sometimes even the soldiers of his guard to bade with him, in so much that there were often a hundred and more persons bating at a time. When age arrived he made no alteration in his bodily habits, but at the same time, instead of putting away from him the thought of death, he was much taken up with it and prepared himself for it with stern severity. He drew up, modified, and completed his will several times over. Three years before his death he made out the distribution of his treasures, his money, his wardrobe, and all his furniture in the presence of his friends and his officers in order that their voice might ensure, after his death, the execution of this partition, and he set down his intentions in this respect in a written summary in which he massed all his riches in three grand lots. The first two were divided into twenty-one portions which were to be distributed amongst the twenty-one metropolitan churches of his empire. After having put these first two lots under seal he willed to preserve to himself his usual enjoyment of the third so long as he lived. But after his death or voluntary renunciation of the things of this world this same lot was to be subdivided into four portions. His intention was that the first should be added to the twenty-one portions which were to go to the metropolitan churches, the second set aside for his sons and daughters, and for the sons and daughters of his sons, and re-divided amongst them in a just and proportionate manner, the third dedicated, according to the usage of the Christians, to the necessities of the poor, and lastly the fourth distributed in the same way under the name of alms amongst the servants of both sexes of the palace for their lifetime. As for the books of which he had amassed a large number in his library he decided that those who wished to have them might buy them at their proper value, and that the money which they produced should be distributed amongst the poor. Having thus carefully regulated his own private affairs and bounty he, two years later in eight thirteen, took the measures necessary for the regulation after his death of public affairs. He had lost, in eight eleven, his eldest son Charles, who had been his constant companion in his wars, and in eight ten, his second son Pepin, whom he had made King of Italy, and he summoned to his side his third son, Louis, King of Aquitaine, who was destined to succeed him. He ordered the convocation of five local councils which were to assemble at Mienz, Rem, Chalon, Tours, and Arles for the purpose of bringing about, subject to the king's ratifications, the reforms necessary in the church. Passing from the affairs of the church to those of the state he convoked at Ex-La-Chapelle a general assembly of bishops, abbots, counts, lay-it-grandes, and of the entire people, and holding council in his palace with the chief amongst them he invited them to make his son Louis, King Emperor, where to all assented, saying that it was very expedient and pleasing also to the people. On Sunday in the next month, August eight-thirteen, Charlemagne repaired, crown on head, with his son Louis, to the cathedral of Ex-La-Chapelle, laid upon the altar another crown, and after praying, addressed to his son a solemn exhortation, respecting all his duties as King towards God and church, towards his family and his people, and asked him if he were fully resolved to fulfill them, and at the answer that he was, had him take the crown that lay upon the altar and place it with his own hands upon his head, which Louis did amidst the acclamations of all present, who cried, Long live the Emperor Louis! Charlemagne then declared his son Emperor jointly with him, and ended the solemnity with these words, Blessed be thou, O Lord God, who hath granted me grace to see with my known eyes my son seated on my throne! And Louis set out again immediately for Aquitaine. He was never to see his father again. Charlemagne, after his son's departure, went out hunting, according to his custom, in the forest of Ardenne, and continued during the whole autumn his usual mode of life. But in January 814 he was taken ill, says Eganard, of a violent fever which kept him to his bed. Recurring forthwith to the remedy he ordinarily employed against fever, he abstained from all nourishment, persuaded that this diet would suffice to drive away or at least assuage the malady. But added to the fever came that pain in the side which the Greeks call pleurisy. Nevertheless the Emperor persisted in his abstinence, supporting his body only by drinks taken at long intervals, and on the seventh day after he had taken to his bed, having received the Holy Communion he expired about nine a.m. on Saturday the twenty-eighth of January 814 in his seventy-first year. After performance of ablutions and funeral dueties the corpse was carried away and buried amidst the profound mourning of all the people in the church he himself had built, and above his tomb there was put up a gilded arcade with his image and this superscription. In this tomb reposeth the body of Charles, great and orthodox emperor, who did gloriously extend the kingdom of the Franks, and did govern it happily for forty-seven years. He died at the age of seventy years in the year of the Lord Eight-fourteen in the seventh year of the Indiction on the fifth of the Callands of February. If we sum up his designs and his achievements we find an admirably sound idea and a vain dream, a great success and a great failure. Charlemagne took in hand the work of placing upon a solid foundation the Frankish-Christian dominion by stopping in the north and south the flood of barbarians and Arabs, paganism and Islamism. In that he succeeded. The inundations of Asiatic populations spent their force in vain against the Gallic frontier. Western and Christian Europe was placed, territorially, beyond reach of attacks from the foreigner and infidel. No sovereign, no human being perhaps ever rendered greater service to the civilization of the world. Charlemagne formed another conception and made another attempt. Like more than one great barbaric warrior he admired the Roman Empire that had fallen, its vastness all in one and its powerful organizations under the hand of a single master. He thought he could resuscitate it, durably, through the victory of a new people and a new faith, by the hand of Franks and Christians. With this view he labored to conquer, convert, and govern. He tried to be, at one and the same time, Caesar, Augustus, and Constantine. And for a moment he appeared to have succeeded, but the appearance passed away with himself. The unity of the Empire and the absolute power of the Emperor were buried in his grave. The Christian religion and human liberty set to work to prepare for Europe, other governments, and other destinies. Great men do great things which would not get done without them. They set their mark plainly upon history, which realizes a portion of their ideas and wishes, but they are far from doing all they meditate, and they know not all they do. They are, at one and the same time, instruments and free agents in a general design which is infinitely above their ken, and which, even if a glimpse of it be caught, remains inscrutable to them, the design of God towards mankind. When great men understand that such is their position and accepted they show sense, and they work to some purpose. When they do not recognize the limits of their free agency and the veil which hides from their eyes the future they are laboring for, they become the dupes and frequently the victims of a blind pride, which events in the long run always end by exposing and punishing. Amongst men of his rank, Charlemagne had this singular good fortune that his error, his misguided attempted imperialism, perished with him, whilst his salutary achievement, the territorial security of Christian Europe, has been durable, to the great honour, as well as the great profit, of European civilisation. END OF CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. From the death of Charlemagne to the accession of Hugh Capet, that is, from 814 to 987, thirteen kings sat upon the throne of France. What then became, under their reign and in the course of those 173 years, of the two great facts which swayed the mind and occupied the life of Charlemagne? What became, that is, of the solid territorial foundation of the kingdom of Christian France, through efficient repression of foreign invasion, and of the unity of that vast empire wherein Charlemagne had attempted and hoped to resuscitate the Roman Empire? The fate of those two facts is the very history of France under the Carlevingian dynasty. It is the only portion of the events of that epoch which still deserves attention nowadays, or it is the only one which has exercised any great and lasting influence on the general history of France. Attempts at foreign invasion of France were renewed very often, and in many parts of Gallo-Francish territory, during the whole duration of the Carlevingian dynasty, and even though they failed, they caused the population of the kingdom to suffer from cruel ravages. Charlemagne, even after his successes against the different barbaric invaders, had foreseen the evils which would be inflicted on France by the most formidable and most determined of them, the Northmen, coming by sea, and landing on the coast. The most closely contemporaneous and most given to detail of his chroniclers, the Monk of St. Gall, tells in prolix and pompous, but evidently heartfelt in sincere terms, the tale of the great emperor's far-sightedness. Charles, who was ever a stirrer, says he, arrived by mere happen unexpectedly in a certain town of Narbonnes-Gall. Whilst he was at dinner, and was as yet unrecognized of any, some corsairs of the Northmen came to ply their piracies in the very port. When their vessels were described, they were supposed to be Jewish traders according to some, African according to others, and British in the opinion of others. But the gifted monarch, perceiving by the build and likeness of the craft that they bear not merchandise but foes, said to his own folk, these vessels be not laden with merchandise, but manned with cruel foes. At these words all the Franks, in rivalry one with another, ran to their ships but uselessly. For the Northmen, indeed, hearing that yonder was he whom it was still their want to call Charles the Hammer, feared lest all their fleet should be taken or destroyed in the port, and they avoided, by a flight of inconceivable rapidity, not only the glaives, but even the eyes of those who were pursuing them. Highest Charles, however, a prey to well-grounded fear, rose up from the table, stationed himself at a window looking eastward, and there remained a long while, and his eyes were filled with tears. As none durst questioned him, this war-like prince explained to the grandees who were about his person the cause of his movement and of his tears. No ye, my legious, wherefore I weep so bitterly. Of assurity I fear not lest these fellows should succeed in injuring me by their miserable piracies. But it grieveeth me deeply that, whilst I live, they should have been nigh to touching at this shore, and I am a prey to violent sorrow when I perceive what evils they will heap upon my descendants and their people. The forecast and the dejection of Charles were not unreasonable. It will be found that there is special mention made in the chronicles of the ninth and tenth centuries of forty-seven incursions into France, of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Irish pirates, all comprised under the name of Northmen, and doubtless many other incursions of less gravity have left no trace in history. The Northmen, says Mr. Ferriel, descended from the north to the south by a sort of natural gradation or ladder. The shelt was the first river by the mouth of which they penetrated inland. The sen was the second, the luar the third. The advance was threatening for the countries traversed by the Garonne, and it was in eight forty-four that vessels freighted with Northmen for the first time ascended this last river to a considerable distance inland, and there took immense booty. The following year they pillaged and burnt Sante. In eight forty-six they got as far as Limoge. The inhabitants, binding themselves unable to make head against the dauntless pirates, abandoned their hearths, together with all they had not time to carry away. Encouraged by these successes the Northmen reappeared next year upon the coasts and in the rivers of Aquitaine, and they attempted to take Bordeaux, since they were valorously repulsed by the inhabitants. But in eight forty-eight, having once more laid siege to that city, they were admitted into it at night by the Jews, who were there in great force. The city was given up to plunder and conflagration. A portion of the people was scattered abroad and the rest put to the sword. Tour, ruine, angers, orléans, mobs, toulous, senlots, bayous, evereaux, nantes, and bovets, some of them more than once, met the fate of Saint, Limoge, and Bordeaux. The monasteries and churches, wherein they hoped to find treasures, were the favorite objects of the Northmen's enterprises. In particular, they plundered at the gates of Paris the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and that of Saint-Denis, once they carried off the abbot, who could not purchase his freedom saved by heavy ransom. They penetrated more than once into Paris itself, and subjected many of its quarters to contributions or pillage. The populations grew into the habit of suffering and fleeing, and the local lords and even the kings made arrangement sometimes with the pirates either for saving the royal domains from the ravages or for having their own share therein. In 850 Pepin, king of Aquitaine, and brother of Charles the Bald, came to an understanding with the Northmen who had ascended the Garon, and were threatening to lose. They arrived under his guidance, says Mr. Ferriel. They laid siege to it, took it, and plundered it, not half-wise, not hastily, as folks who feared to be surprised, but leisurely, with all security, by virtue of a treaty of alliance with one of the kings of the country. Throughout Aquitaine there was but one cry of indignation against Pepin, and the popularity of Charles was increased in proportion to all the horror inspired by the ineffable misdeed of his adversary. Charles the Bald himself, if he did not ally himself as Pepin did with the invaders, took scarce any interest in the fate of the populations, and scarcely more trouble to protect them, for Hinkmar, Archbishop of Rem, wrote to him in 859, many folks say that you are incessantly repeating that it is not for you to mix yourself up with these depredations and robberies, and that everyone has but to defend himself as best he may. It were tedious to relate or even to enumerate all these incursions of the Northmen with their monotonous incidents. When their frequency and their general character have been notified, all has been done that is due to them from history. However, there are three on which it may be worthwhile to dwell particularly, by reason of their grave historical consequences, as well as of the dramatic details which have been transmitted to us about them. In the middle and during the last half of the ninth century, a chief of the Northmen, named Hustank or Hastings, appeared several times over the coasts and in the rivers of France, with numerous vessels and a following. He had also with him, say the chronicles, a young Norwegian or Danish prince, Björn, called Ironsides, whom he had educated and who had preferred sharing the fortunes of his governor to living quietly with the king his father. After several expeditions into western France, Hastings became the theme of terrible and very probably fabulous stories. He extended his cruises, they say, to the Mediterranean, and having arrived at the coast of Tuscany, within sight of a city which in his ignorance he took for Rome, he resolved to pillage it, but not feeling strong enough to attack it by assault, he sent to the bishop to say he was very ill, felt a wish to become a Christian, and begged to be baptized. Some days afterwards his comrades spread a report that he was dead and claimed for him the honors of a solemn burial. The bishop consented, the coffin of Hastings was carried into the church, attended by a large number of his followers, without visible weapons, but in the middle of the ceremony Hastings suddenly leapt up, sword in hand, from his coffin. His followers displayed the weapons they had concealed, closed the doors, slew the priests, pillaged the ecclesiastical treasures, and re-embarked before the very eyes of the stupefied population, to go and resume on the coasts of France, their incursions and their ravages. Whether they were true or false, these rumors of bold artifices and distant expeditions on the part of Hastings aggravated the dismay inspired by his appearance. He penetrated into the interior of the country and Poteu, Anjou, Brittany, and along the Seine, pillaged the monasteries of Jumeige, Saint-Vaudriel, and Sainte-Evre-Rue, took possession of Charte, and appeared before Paris, where Charles the Bald, entrenched at Saint-Denis, was deliberating with his prelates and barons as to how he might resist the Northmen or treat with them. The Chronicle says that the barons advised resistance, but that the king preferred negotiation, and sent the abbot of Saint-Denis, the which was an exceedingly wise man, to Hastings, who, after a long parley and by reason of large gifts and promises, consented to stop his cruisings, to become a Christian, and to settle in the Countship of Charte, which the king gave him as an hereditary possession with all its appurtenances. According to other accounts it was only some years later, under the young king Louis III, grandson of Charles the Bald, that Hastings was induced, either by reverses or by payment of money, to cease from his piracy and accept in recompense the Countship of Charte. Whatever may have been the date, he was, it is believed, the first chieftain of the Northmen who renounced a life of adventure and plunder, to become, in France, a great-landed proprietor and a count of the kings. Prince Bjorn then separated from his governor, and put again to sea, laden with so rich a booty that he could never feel any want of wealth, but a tempest swallowed up a great part of his fleet, and cast him upon the coast of Friesland, where he died soon after, for which Hastings was exceeding sorry. A greater chieftain of the Northmen than Hastings was soon to follow his example, and found Normandy in France, but before Rol, that is, Rolo, came and gave the name of his race to a French province, the piratical Northmen were again to attempt a greater blow against France, and to suffer a great reverse. In November 885, under the reign of Charles the Fat, after having, for more than forty years, irregularly ravaged France, they resolved to unite their forces in order at length to obtain possession of Paris, whose outskirts they had so often pillaged without having been able to enter the heart of the place, in the Île de la Cité, which had originally been, and still was, the real Paris. Two bodies of troops were set in motion, one under the command of Rolo, who was already famous amongst his comrades, marched on Rouen, the other went right up the course of the Seine, under the orders of Siegfried, whom the Northmen called their king. Rolo took Rouen, and pushed on at once for Paris. Duke Renault, general of the Gallo-Frankish troops, went to encounter him on the banks of the Eur, and sent to him to sound his intentions. Hastings, the newly made Count of Chartres, valiant warriors, said Hastings to Rolo, once ye come, what seek ye here? What is the name of your Lord and Master? Tell us this, for we be sent unto you by the King of the Franks. We be Danes, answered Rolo, and all be equally masters amongst us. We be come to drive out the inhabitants of this land, and to subject it as our own country. But who art thou, thou who speakest so glibly? You have some time heard tell of one Hastings, who issuing forth from amongst you, came hither with much shipping, and made desert a great part of the Kingdom of the Franks? Yes, said Rolo, we have heard tell of him. Hastings began well and ended ill. Will ye yield you to King Charles? asked Hastings. We yield, was the answer, to none. All that we shall take by our arms, we will keep as our right. Go and tell this, if thou wilt, to the King, whose envoy thou boastest to be. Hastings returned to the Gallo-Frankish army, and Rolo prepared to march on Paris. Hastings had gone back somewhat troubled in mind. Now there was amongst the Franks one Count troubled, Tybalt, who greatly coveted the Countship of Chartres, and he said to Hastings, Why slumberest thou softly? Knowest thou not that King Charles doth purpose thy death, because of all the Christian blood that thou didst a foretime unjustly shed? Be think thee of all the evil thou hast done him, by reason whereof he purposeth to drive thee from his land? Take heed to thyself that thou be not smitten unawares. Hastings dismayed, at once sold to Tybalt, the town of Chartres, and removing all that belonged to him, departed to go and resume, for all that appears his old course of life. On the twenty-fifth of November, eight eighty-five, all the forces of the Northmen formed a junction before Paris. Seven hundred huge barks covered two leagues of the Seine, bringing, it is said, more than thirty thousand men. The chieftains were astonished at sight of the new fortifications of the city, a double wall of circumvillation, the bridges crowned with towers, and in the environs the ramparts of the Abbeys of Saint Denis and Saint Germain solidly rebuilt. Sigfred hesitated to attack a town so well defended. He demanded to enter alone and have an interview with the bishop, Goslin. Take pity on thyself and thy flock, he said to him, but let us pass through this city. We will in no wise touch the town. We will do our best to preserve for thee and count Udy's all your possessions. This city, replied the bishop, hath been confided unto us by the Emperor Charles, king and ruler under God, of the powers of the earth. He hath confided it unto us, not that it should cause the ruin but the salvation of the kingdom. If peradventure these walls had been confided to thy keeping, as they have been to mine, whatst thou do as thou bidest me? If I ever do so, answered Sigfred, may my head be condemned to fall by the sword and serve as food for the dogs. But if thou yield not to our prayers, so soon as the sun shall commence his course, our armies will launch upon thee their poisoned arrows, and when the sun shall end his course, they will give thee over to all the horrors of famine, and this will they do from year to year. The bishop, however, persisted, without further discussion, being as certain of Count Udy's as he was of himself. Udy's, who was young but recently made Count of Paris, was the eldest son of Robert the Strong, Count of Anjou, of the same line as Charlemagne, but lately slain in the battle against the Northmen. Paris had for defenders two heroes, one of the Church and the other of the Empire, the faith of the Christian and the fealty of the vassal, the conscientiousness of the priest and the honor of the warrior. The siege lasted thirteen months, whilst pushed vigorously forward with eight several assaults, whilst maintained by close investment, and with all the alterations of success in reverse, all the intermixure of brilliant daring and obscure sufferings that can occur when the assailants are determined and the defenders devoted. Not only a contemporary but an eyewitness, Abbo, a monk of Saint-Germain-de-Pres, has recounted all the details in a long poem, where in the writer, devoid of talent, adds nothing to the simple representation of events. It is history itself which gives to Abbo's poem a high degree of interest. We do not possess, in reference to these continual struggles of the Northmen with the Gallo-Frankish populations, any other document which is equally precise and complete, or which could make us so well acquainted with all the incidents, all the phrases of this irregular warfare between two peoples, one without a government, the other without a country. The bishop, Goslin, died during the siege. Count Yudhis quitted Paris for a time to go and beg aid of the emperor, but the Parisians soon saw him reappear on the heights of Montmartre, with three battalions of troops, and he re-entered the town, spurring on his horse and striking right and left with his battle-axe through the ranks of the dumb-founded besiegers. The struggle was prolonged throughout the summer, and when in November 886 Charles the fat at last appeared before Paris, with a large army of all nations, it was to purchase the retreat of the Northmen at the cost of a heavy ransom, and by allowing them to go in winter and burgundy whereof the inhabitants obeyed not the emperor. Some months afterward in 887 Charles the fat was deposed, at a diet held on the banks of the Rhine by the grandees of Germanic France, and Arnolf, a natural son of Carlemagne, the brother of Louis III, was proclaimed emperor in his stead. At the same time Count Udyse, the gallant defender of Paris, was elected king at Campania and crowned by the Archbishop of Seine. Guy, Duke of Spoleto, descended from Charlemagne in the female line, hastened to France and was declared king at Longraise by the bishop of that town, but returned with precipitation to Italy, seeing no chance of maintaining himself in his French kingship. Elsewhere Basso, Duke of Arles, became king of Provence, and the Burgundian Count Rodolphe had himself crowned at St. Maurice, in the Valais, king of Transjurian Burgundy. There was still in France a legitimate Carlevingian, a son of Louis the Stutterer, who was hereafter to become Charles the Simple, but being only a child he had been rejected or completely forgotten, and in the interval that was to elapse ere this time should arrive, kings were being made in all directions. In the midst of this confusion, the Northmen, though they kept at a distance from Paris, pursued in western France their cruising and plundering. In Rolo they had a chieftain far superior to his vagabond predecessors. Though he still led the same life that they had, he displayed therein other faculties, other inclinations, other views. In his youth he had made an expedition to England, and had there contracted a real friendship with the wise king Alfred the Great. During a campaign in Friesland he had taken prisoner Reignier, Count of Hanoe, and Aberaide, Countess of Brabant, made a request to Rolo for her husband's release, offering in return to set free twelve captains of the Northmen, her prisoners, and to give up all the gold she possessed. Rolo took only half the gold, and restored to the Countess her husband. When, in 885, he became master of Rouen, instead of devastating the city, after the fashion of his kind, he respected the buildings, had the walls repaired, and humored the inhabitants. In spite of his violent and extortionate practices where he met with obstinate resistance, there were to be discerned in him symptoms of more noble sentiments and of an instinctive leaning towards order, civilization, and government. After the deposition of Charles the Fad and during the reign of Eudes a lively struggle was maintained between the Frankish king and the chieftain of the Northmen, who had neither of them forgotten their early encounters. They strove, one against the other, with varied fortunes. Eudes succeeded in beating the Northmen at Mont-Facon, but was beaten in Vermandoie by another band, commanded it is said by the veteran Hastings, sometime Count of Chartres. Rolo too had his share at one time of success, at another of reverse, but he made himself master of several important towns, showed a disposition to treat the quiet populations gently, and made a fresh trip to England, during which he renewed friendly relations with her king, Athelstan, the successor of Alfred the Great. He thus became, from day to day, more reputable as well as more formidable in France, in so much that Eudes himself was obliged to have recourse in dealing with him to negotiations and presents. When in 898 Eudes was dead and Charles the Simple, at hardly nineteen years of age, had been recognized sole king of France, the ascendancy of Rolo became such that the necessity of treating with him was clear. In 911 Charles, by the advice of his counsellors, and amongst them of Robert, brother of the late King Eudes, who had himself become Count of Paris and Duke of France, sent to the chieftain of the Northmen Franco, Archbishop of Rouen, with orders to offer him the session of a considerable portion of Nustria and the hand of his young daughter Giskla, on condition that he became a Christian and acknowledged himself the king's vassal. Rolo, by the advice of his comrades, received these overtures with a good grace, and agreed to a truce for three months, during which they might treat about peace. On the day fixed, Charles, accompanied by Duke Robert and Rolo, surrounded by his warriors, repaired to St. Clair-sur-Ept, on the opposite banks of the river, and exchanged numerous messages. Charles offered Rolo Flanders, which the Northmen refused, considering it too swampy. As to the maritime position of Nustria, he would not be contented with it. It was, he said, covered with forests, and had become quite a stranger to the plowshare by reason of the Northmen's incessant incursions. He demanded the addition of territories taken from Brittany, and that the princes of that province, Berenger and Allen, lords respectively, of Redden and Dell, should take the oath of fidelity to him. When matters had been arranged on this basis, the bishops told Rolo that he who received such a gift as the Duchy of Normandy was bound to kiss the king's foot. Never, quote Rolo, will I bend the knee before the knees of any, and will I kiss the foot of no one. At the solicitation of the Franks he then ordered one of his warriors to kiss the king's foot. The Northmen, remaining bolt upright, took hold of the king's foot, raised it to his mouth, and so made the king fall backwards, which caused great burst of laughter and much disturbance among the throng. Then the king and all the grandees who are about him, Prelates, Abbots, Dukes, and Counts, swore in the name of the Catholic faith that they would protect the patrician Rolo in his life, his members and his folk, and would guarantee to him the possession of the aforesaid land, to him and his descendants for ever. After which the king, well satisfied, returned to his domains, and Rolo departed with Duke Robert for the town of Rouen. CHAPTER XII. The dignity of Charles the Simple had no reason to be well satisfied, but the great political question which, a century before, caused Charlemagne such lively anxiety, was solved. The most dangerous, the most incessantly renewed of all foreign invasions, those of the Northmen, ceased to threaten France. The vagabond pirates had a country to cultivate and defend, the Northmen were becoming French. No such transformation was near taking place in the case of the invasions of the Saracens and Southern Gaul. They continued to infest Aquitania, Septimania, and Provence. Their robber hordes appearing frequently on the coast of the Mediterranean and the banks of the Rhône, at Agmort, at Marseille, at Arles, and in Camarque. They sometimes penetrated into Dauphine, Rojerque, Limousin, and Saint-Tung. The author of this history saw, at the commencement of the present century, the mountains of the Savines, the ruins of the towers built a thousand years ago by the inhabitants of those rugged countries, to put their families and their flocks under shelter from the incursions of the Saracens. But these incursions were of short duration, and most frequently undertaken by plunderers few a number, who treated precipitately with their booty. Africa was not, as Asia was, an inexhaustible source of nations burning to push onward, one upon another, to go wandering and settling elsewhere. The people of the North move willingly towards the South, where living is easier and pleasanter, but the people of the South are not much disposed to migrate to the North, with its soil so hard to cultivate, and its leaden skies, into the midst of its fogs and frosts. After a course of plundering in Aquitania or in Provence, the Arabs of Spain and of Africa were eager to recross the Pyrenees or the Mediterranean, and regain their own lovely climate, and their life of easefulness that never piled. Furthermore, between Christians and Muslims the religious antipathy was profound. The Christian missionaries were not much given to carrying their pious seal into the home of the Muslims, and the Muslims were far less disposed than the Pagans to become Christians. To preserve their conquests, the Arabs of Spain had to struggle against the refugee Goths and the Austerists, and Charlemagne, by extending those of the Franks to Ebro, had given the Christian Goths a powerful alliance against the Spanish Muslims. For all these reasons the invasions of the Saracens and the South of France did not threaten, as those of the Northmen did in the North, the security of the Gallo-Francish monarchy and the Gallo-Roman populations of the South were able to defend their national independence at the same time against the Saracens and the Franks. They did so successfully in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the French monarchy, which was being founded between the Loire and the Rhine, had thus for some time a breach in it, without ever suffering serious displacement. A new people, the Hungarians, which was the only name then given to the Magyars, appeared at this epoch for the first time amongst the devastators of Western Europe. From nine ten to nine fifty-four, as a consequence of movements and wars on the Danube, Hungarian hordes, after scouring central Germany, penetrated into Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne, Burgundy, Berry, Dauphine, Provence, and even Aquitaine. But this inundation was transitory, and if the populations of those countries had much to suffer from it, the Gallo-Francish dominion, in spite of inward disorder and the feebleness of the latter Carolom engines, was not seriously endangered thereby. And so the first of Charlemagne's grand designs, the territorial security of the Gallo-Francish and Christian dominion, was accomplished. In the East and the North, the Germanic and Asiatic populations, which had so long upset it, were partly arrested at its frontiers, partly incorporated regularly in its midst. In the South, the Musselman populations which, in the eighth century, had appeared so near overwhelming it, were powerless to deal at any heavy blow. Substantially France was founded. But what had become of Charlemagne's second grand design, the resuscitation of the Roman Empire at the hands of the barbarians that had conquered it and become Christians? Let us leave Louis de Venere his traditional name, although it is not an exact rendering of that which was given him by his contemporaries. They called him Louis the Pious. And so indeed he was, sincerely and even scrupulously pious, but he was still more weak than pious, as weak in heart and character as in mind, as destitute of ruling ideas of strength and will, fluctuating at the mercy of transitory impressions, or surrounding influences, or positional embarrassments. The name of de Venere is suited to him. It expresses his moral worth and his political incapacity both at once. As king of Accotania, in the time of Charlemagne, Louis made himself esteemed and loved. His justice, his suavity, his probity, and his piety were pleasing to the people, and his weaknesses disappeared under the strong hand of his father. When he became emperor, he began his reign by a reaction against the excesses, real or supposed, of the preceding reign. Charlemagne's morals were far from regular, and he troubled himself but little about the license prevailing in his family or his palace. At a distance he ruled with a tight and heavy hand. Louis established at his court, for his sisters as well as his servants, austere regulations. He restored to the subjugated Saxons certain of the rights of which Charlemagne had deprived them. He sent out everywhere his commissioners, Misi Domenici, with orders to listen to complaints and redress grievances, and to mitigate his father's rule, which was rigorous in its application, and yet insufficient to repress disturbance, notwithstanding its preventive purpose in its washable supervision. Almost simultaneously with his accession, Louis committed an act more serious and compromising. He had, by his wife Hermengard, three sons, Lothair, Pepin, and Louis, aged respectively nineteen, eleven, and eight. In 817 Louis summoned at Aix-la-Chapelle the General Assembly of his Dominions, and there, whilst declaring that neither to those who were wisely minded nor to him, did it appear expedient to break up, for the love he bear his sons and by the will of man, the unity of the empire, preserved by God himself. He had resolved to share with his eldest son, Lothar, the imperial throne. Lothar was in fact crowned emperor, and his two brothers, Pepin and Louis, were crowned king. In order that they might reign after their father's death and under their brother and lord, Lothar, to wit, Pepin, over Aquitaine, in a great part of southern Gaul and of Burgundy, Louis, beyond the Rhine, over Bavaria, and the diverse peoplets of the east of Germany. The rest of Gaul and of Germany, as well as the kingdom of Italy, was to belong to Lothar, emperor and head of the Frankish monarchy, to whom his brothers would have to repair year by year to come to an understanding with him, and receive his instructions. The last named kingdom, the most considerable of the three, remained under the direct government of Louis the Devonaire, and at the same time of his son Lothar, sharing the title of emperor. The other two sons, Pepin and Louis, entered, notwithstanding their childhood, upon immediate possession, the one of Aquitaine and the other of Bavaria, under the superior authority of their father and brother, the joint emperors. Charlemagne had vigorously maintained the unity of the empire for all that he had delegated to two of his sons, Pepin and Louis, the government of Italy and Aquitaine, with the title of king. Louis the Devonaire, whilst regulating beforehand the division of his dominion, likewise desired, as he said, to maintain the unity of the empire, but he forgot that he was no Charlemagne. It was not long before numerous mournful experiences showed to what extent the unity of the empire required personal superiority in the emperor, and how rapid would be the decay of the fabric when there remained nothing but the title of the founder. In 816, Pope Stephen IV came to France to consecrate Louis the Devonaire emperor. Many a time already the popes had rendered the Frankish kings this service and honor. The Franks had been proud to see their king, Charlemagne, protecting Adrian I against the Lombards, then crowned emperor at Rome by Leo III, and then having his two sons, Pepin and Louis, crowned at Rome by the same pope, kings respectively of Italy and Aquitaine. On these different occasions Charlemagne, whilst testifying the most profound respect for the pope, had in his relations with him always taken care to preserve, together with his political greatness all his personal dignity. But when in 816 the Franks saw Louis the Pious not only go out of Rem to meet Stephen IV, but prostrate himself, from head to foot, and rise only when the pope held out a hand to him, the spectators felt saddened and humiliated at the sight of their emperor in the posture of a penitent monk. Several insurrections burst out in the empire, the first among the Basques of Aquitaine, the next in Italy, where Bernard, son of Pepin, having, after his father's death, become king in 812, with the consent of his grandfather Charlemagne, could not quietly see his kingdom pass into the hands of his cousin Lothair, at the orders of his uncle Louis. These two attempts were easily repressed, but the third was more serious. It took place in Brittany, amongst those populations of Amorica, who were still buried in their woods, and who were excessively jealous of their independence. In 818 they took for their king one of their principal chieftains, named Morvan, and not confining themselves to a refusal of all tribute to the king of the Franks. They renewed their ravages upon the Frankish territories bordering on their frontier. Louis was at that time holding a general assembly of his dominions at Etzla Chapelle, and Count Lantbert, commandant of the marches of Brittany, came and reported to him what was going on. A Frankish monk, named Dick Carr, happened to be at the assembly. He was a man of piety and sense, a friend of peace, and, moreover, with some knowledge of the Breton king Morvan, as his monastery had property in the neighborhood. Him the emperor commissioned to convey to the king his grievances and his demands. After some day's journey the monk passed the frontier, and arrived at vast space enclosed on one side by a noble river, and on all the others by forests and swamps, hedges and ditches. In the middle of this space was a large dwelling, which was Morvan's. Dick Carr found it full of warriors, the king having no doubt some expedition on hand. The monk announced himself as a messenger from the emperor of the Franks. The style of announcement caused some confusion, at first to the Breton, who, however hasty to conceal his emotion under an air of goodwill and joyousness, to impose upon his comrades. The latter were got rid of, and the king remained alone with the monk, who explained the object of his mission. He descanted upon the power of the Emperor Louis, recounted his complaints, and warned the Breton, kindly and in a private capacity, of the danger of his situation, a danger so much the greater in that he and his people would meet with less consideration, seeing they kept up the religion of their pagan forefathers. Morvan gave attentive ear to this sermon, with his eyes fixed on the ground and his foot tapping it from time to time. Dick Carr thought that he had succeeded, but an incident supervened. It was the hour when Morvan's wife was accustomed to come and look for him ere they retired to the nuptial couch. She appeared, eager to know who the stranger was, what he had come for, what he had said, what answer he had received. She polluted her questions with auglings and caresses. She kissed the knees, the hands, the beard, and the face of the king, testifying her desire to be alone with him. Oh, king and glory of the mighty Britons, dear spouse of mine, what tidings bring it this stranger? Is it peace or is it war? This stranger, answered Morvan with a smile, is an envoy of the Franks. But bring he peace or bring he war, it is the affair of men alone. Content thee with thy women's duties. Thereupon Dick Carr, perceiving that he was countered, said to Morvan, Sir King, to his time that I return, tell me what answer I am to take back to my sovereign. Leave me this night to take thought thereon, replied the Britain chief, with a wavering air. When the morning came, Dick Carr presented himself once more to Morvan, whom he found up, but still half drunk, and full of very different sentiments from those of the night before. It required some effort, stupefied and tottering as he was with the effects of wine and the pleasures of the night to say to Dick Carr, go back to thy king, and tell him from me that my land was never his, and that I owe him not of tribute or of submission. Let him reign over the Franks. As for me, I reign over the Britons. If he will bring war on me, he will find me ready to pay him back. The monk returned to Louis the Debonair, and rendered account of his mission. War was resolved upon, and the emperor collected his troops, Alemanians, Saxons, Thuringians, Burgundians, and Aquitanians, without counting Franks or Gallo-Romans. They began their march, moving upon Vang. Louis was at their head, and the Empress accompanied him, but he left her, already ill and fatigued at Anjir. The Franks entered the country of the Britons, searched the woods and morasses, found no armed men in the open country, but encountered them in scattered and scanty companies at the entrance of all the defiles on the heights commanding the pathways, and wherever men could hide themselves and await the moment for appearing unexpectedly. The Franks heard them, from amidst the heather in the brushwood, uttering shrill cries, to give warning one to another or to alarm the enemy. The Franks advanced cautiously, and at last arrived at the entrance of the thick wood which surrounded morvins abode. He had not yet sent out with the pick of the warriors he had about them, but at the approach of the Franks he summoned his wife and his domestics, and said to them, Defend ye well this house in these woods, as for me I am going to march forward to collect my people, after which to return, but not without booty and spoils. He put on his armor, took a javelin in each hand, and mounted his horse. Thou seest, said he to his wife, these javelins I brandish. I will bring them back to thee this very day, died with the blood of Franks. Farewell. Setting out he pierced, followed by his men, through the thickness of the forest, and advanced to meet the Franks. The battle began. The large numbers of the Franks, who covered the ground for some distance, dismayed the Britons and many of them fled, seeking where they might hide themselves. Morvin, beside himself with rage, and at the head of his most devoted followers, rushed down upon the Franks as if to demolish them at a single stroke, and many fell beneath his blows. He singled out a warrior of inferior grade, towards whom he made at a gallop, and insulting him by word of mouth, after the ancient fashion of the Celtic warriors cried, Frank, I am going to give thee my first present, a present which I have been keeping for thee a long while, and which I hope thou wilt bear in mind, and launched at him a javelin, which the other received on his shield. Proud Britain, replied the Frank, I have received thy present, and I am going to give thee mine. He dug both spurs into his horse's hides, and galloped down upon Morvin, who, clad though he was in a coat of mail, fell pierced by the thrust of a lance. The Frank had but time to dismount and cut off his head, when he fell himself mortally wounded by one of Morvin's young warriors, but not without having, in his turn, dealt the other his death blow. It spread on all sides that Morvin is dead, and the Franks come thronging to the scene of the encounter. There is picked up and passed from hand to hand ahead all bloody and fearfully disfigured. Dick Cartham Monk is called to see it, and to say whether it is that of Morvin, but he has to wash the mass of disfigurement and to partially adjust the hair before he can pronounce that it is really Morvin's. There is then no more doubt, resistance is now impossible. The widow, the family, and the servants of Morvin arrive, are brought before Louis the Devonair, except all the conditions imposed upon them, and the Franks withdraw with the boast that Brittany is henceforth their tributary. CHAPTER XII. On arriving at Angiers Louis found the Empress Hermengard dying, and two days afterwards she was dead. He had a tender heart, which was not proof against sorrow, and he testified a desire to abdicate and turn Monk. But he was dissuaded from his purpose, for it was easy to influence his resolutions. A little later he was advised to marry again, and he yielded. Several princesses were introduced, and he chose Judith of Bavaria, daughter of Count Wealth, or Guelph, a family already powerful and in later times celebrated. Judith was young, beautiful, witty, ambitious, and skilled in the art of making the gift of pleasing subserve the passion for ruling. Louis, during his expedition into Brittany, had just witnessed the fader result of a woman's empire over her husband. He was destined himself to offer a more striking and more long-lived example of it. In 823 he had, by his new Empress Judith, a son, whom he called Charles, and who was here after to be known as Charles the Bald. This son became his mother's ruling, if not exclusive passion, and the source of his father's woes. His birth could not fail to cause ill temper and mistrust in Louis's three sons by Hermengard, who were already kings. They had, but a short time previously, received the first proof of their father's weakness. In 822 Louis, repenting of his severity towards his nephew, Bernard of Italy, whose eyes he had caused to be put out as a punishment for rebellion, and who had died in consequence, considered himself bound to perform at Atigny, in the Church and before the people, a solemn act of penance, which was creditable to his honesty and piety, but the details left upon the minds of the beholders an impression unfavorable to the Emperor's dignity and authority. In 829, during an assembly held at Worm, he, yielding to his wives and treaties and doubtless to his own yearnings towards his youngest son, said it not the solemn act whereby, in 817, he had shared his dominions amongst his three elder sons, and took away from two of them, in Burgundy and Alemania, some of the territories he had assigned to them, and gave them to the boy Charles for his share. Lothair, Pepin, and Louis, thereupon revolted. Court rivalries were added to family differences. The Emperor had summoned to his side a young southern, Bernard by name, Duke of Septimania, and son of Count William of Toulouse, who had gallantly fought the Saracens. He made him his chief Chamberlain and his favourite councillor. Bernard was bold, ambitious, vain, imperious, and restless. He removed his rivals from court, and put in their places his own creatures. He was accused not only of abusing the Emperor's favour, but even of carrying on a guilty intrigue with the Empress Judith. There grew up against him, and by consequence against the Emperor, the Empress, and their youngest son, a powerful opposition, in which certain ecclesiastics, and amongst them Vala, Abbott of Corby, cousin German, but lately one of the privy councillors of Charlemagne, joined eagerly. Some had at heart the unity of the Empire, which Louis was breaking up more and more. Others were concerned for the spiritual interests of the Church, which Louis, in spite of his piety and by reason of his weakness, often permitted to be attacked. Thus strengthened, the conspirators considered themselves certain of success. They had the Empress Judith carried off and shut up in the convent of Saint Redigan at Potier, and Louis in person came to deliver himself up to them at Campania, where they were assembled. There they passed a decree to the effect that the power and title of Emperor were transferred from Louis to Lothair, his eldest son, that the act whereby a share of the Empire had been but lately assigned to Charles was annulled, and that the act of 817, which had regulated the partition of Louis's dominions after his death, was once more in force. But soon there was a burst of reaction in favour of the Emperor. Lothair's two brothers, jealous of his late elevation, made overtures to their father. The ecclesiastics were a little ashamed at being mixed up in a revolt. The people felt pity for the poor, honest Emperor, and a general assembly, meeting at Nimmigun, abolished the acts of Campania, and restored to Louis his title and his power. But it was not long before there was a revolt again, originating this time with Pepin, King of Aquitaine. Louis fought him, and gave Aquitaine to Charles the Bald. The alliance between the three sons of Hermengard was at once renewed. They raised an army, the Emperor marched against them with his, and the two hosts met between Calmar and Bale, in a place called Lechamps Rouge, the Field of Red. Negotiations were set on foot, and Louis was called upon to leave his wife Judith and his son Charles, and put himself under the guardianship of his elder sons. He refused, but just when the conflict was about to commence, desertion took place in Louis's army. Most of the prelates, laics, and men-at-arms who had accompanied him passed over to the Camp of Lothair, and the Field of Red became the Field of Falsed, Lechamps du Messange. Louis, left almost alone, ordered his attendance to withdraw, being unwilling, he said, that any one of them should lose life or limb on his account, and surrendered to his sons. They received him with great demonstrations of respect, but without relinquishing the prosecution of their enterprise. Lothair hastily collected an assembly, which proclaimed him the Emperor, with the addition of diverse territories to the kingdoms of Aquitaine and Bavaria, and three months afterwards another assembly, meaning at Copegne, declared the Emperor Louis to have forfeited the crown, for having, by his faults and incapacity, suffered to sink so sadly low the empire which had been raised to grandeur and brought into unity by Charlemagne and his predecessors. Louis submitted to this decision, himself read out aloud in the churns of St. Medard at Soissant, but not quite unresistingly, a confession in eight articles of his faults, and laying his balderic upon the altar, stripped off his royal robe, and received from the hands of Ebo, Archbishop of Rem, the grey vestment of a penitent. Lothair considered his father dethroned for good, and himself, henceforth, sole Emperor, but he was mistaken. For six years longer the scenes which have just been described kept repeating themselves again and again. Rivalries and secret plots began once more between the three victorious brothers and their partisans, popular feeling revived in favour of Louis, a large portion of the clergy shared it, several counts of Nestria and Burgundy appeared in arms in the name of the deposed Emperor, and the seductive and able Judith came afresh upon the scene, and gained over to the cause of her husband and her son a multitude of friends. In 834 two Assemblies, one meeting at Sondanie and the other at Thiongville, annulled all the acts of the Assembly of Compagnie, and for the third time put Louis in possession of the Imperial title and power. He displayed no violence in his use of it, but he was growing more and more irresolute and weak, when, in 838, the second of his rebellious sons, Pepin, King of Aquitaine, died suddenly. Louis, younger under the sway of Judith, speedily convoked at Verne's, in 839, once more and for the last time a general assembly. Where at, leaving his son Louis of Bavaria reduced to his kingdom in Eastern Europe, he divided the rest of his dominions into two nearly equal parts, separated by the course of the Muse and the Roan. Between these two parts he left the choice to Lothair, who took the Eastern portion, promising at the same time to guarantee the Western portion to his younger brother Charles. Louis the Germanic protested against this partition, and took up arms to resist it. His father the Emperor set himself in motion towards the Rhine, to reduce him to submission, but on arriving close to Mayence he caught a violent fever and died on the twentieth of June 840 at the Castle of Engelheim on a little island in the river. His last acts were a fresh proof of his goodness towards even his rebellious sons and of a solicitude for his last born. He sent to Louis the Germanic his pardon, and to Lothair the golden crown and sword, at the same time bidding him fulfill his father's wishes on behalf of Charles and Judith. There is no telling whether, in the credulousness of his good nature, Louis had at his dying hour any great confidence in the appeal he made to his son Lothair, and in the impression which would be produced on his other son, Louis of Bavaria, by the pardon bestowed. The prayers of the dying are of little avail against violent passions and barbaric manners. Scarcely was Louis the debonair dead when Lothair was already conspiring against young Charles, and was in secret alliance for his disboilment with Pepin II, the late King of Aquitaine's son, who had taken up arms for the purpose of seizing his father's kingdom, in the possession of which his grandfather Louis had not been pleased to confirm him. Charles suddenly learning that his mother Judith was on the point of being besieged in Portier by the Aquitaine's, and in spite of the friendly protestations sent to him by Lothair, it was not long before he discovered the plot formed against him. He was not wanting enshrudeness or energy, and having first provided for his mother's safety, he set about forming an alliance in the cause of their common interests with his other brother, Louis the Germanic, who was equally in danger from the ambition of Lothair. The historians of the period do not say what negotiator was employed by Charles on this distant and delicate mission, but several circumstances indicate that the Empress Judith herself undertook it, that she went in quest of the King of Bavaria, and that it was she who, with her accustomed grace and address, determined him to make common cause with his younger against their eldest brother. Diverse incidents retarded for a whole year the outburst of this family plot, and of the war of which it was the precursor. The position of the young King Charles appeared for some time a very bad one, but certain chieftains, says the historian Nithard, faithful to his mother and to him, and having nothing more to lose than life or limb, chose rather to die gloriously than to betray their King. The arrival of Louis the Germanic with his troops helped to swell the forces and increase the competence of Charles, and it was on the twenty-first of June, 841, exactly a year after the death of Louis the Debonair, that the two armies, that of Lothair and Pepin on the one side, and that of Charles the Bald and Louis the Germanic on the other, stood face to face in the neighborhood of the village of Fontenay, six leagues from Auxerre, on the rivulet of the Audraise. Never according to such evidence as is forthcoming, since the battle on the plains of Chalon against the Huns, and that of Portier against the Saracens, had so great masses of men been engaged. There would be nothing untruthlike, says that scrupulous authority, M. Ferriel, in putting the whole number of combatants at three hundred thousand, and there is nothing to show that either of the two armies was much less numerous than the other. However that may be, the leaders hesitated for four days to come to blows, and whilst they were hesitating, the old favorite not only of Louis the Debonair, but also according to several chroniklers of the Empress Judith, held himself aloof with his troops in the vicinity, having made equal promise of assistance to both sides, and waiting to govern his decision for the prospect afforded by the first conflict. The battle began on the twenty-fifth of June at Daybreak, and was at first in favor of Lothair, but the troops of Charles the Bald recovered the advantage which had been lost by Louis the Germanic, and the action was soon nothing but a terribly simple scene of carnage between enormous masses of men, charging hand to hand, again and again, with a front extending over a couple of leagues. Before mid-day the slaughter, the plunder, the spoilation of the dead, all was over. The victory of Charles and Louis was complete. The victors had retired to their camp, and there remained nothing on the field of battle but corpses and thick heaps, or a long line, according as they had fallen in the disorder of life-light, or steadily fighting in their ranks. A cursed be this day, cries Engelbert, one of Lothair's officers, in rough Latin. Be it unnumbered in the return of the year, but wiped out of all remembrance. Be it unlit by the light of the sun. Be it without either dawn or twilight. A cursed also be this night, this awful night in which fell the brave, the most expert in battle. I narrow has seen more fearful slaughter in streams of blood fell Christian men. The linen vestments of the dead did whiten the champagne, even as it is whitened by the birds of autumn. In spite of this battle, which appeared a decisive one, Lothair made zealous efforts to continue the struggle. He scoured the countries wherein he hoped to find partisans, to the Saxons he promised the unrestricted re-establishment of their pagan worship, and several of the Saxon tribes responded to his appeal. Louis the Germanic and Charles the Bald, having information of these preliminaries, resolved to solemnly renew their alliance, and seven months after their victory at Fontenay, in February 842, they repaired both of them, each with his army, to Argenteria, on the right bank of the Rhine, between Bale and Strasbourg. And there, at an open-air meeting, Louis I, addressing the chieftains about him in the German tongue, said, He all know how often, since our father's death, Lothair hath attacked us. In order to destroy us, this, my brother, and me. Having never been able, as brothers and Christians, or in any just way, to obtain peace from him, we were constrained to appeal to the judgment of God. Lothair was beaten and retired, whither he could, with his following, for we, restrained by paternal affection and moved with compassion for Christian people, were unwilling to pursue them to extermination. Neither then nor a foretime did we demand ought else save that each of us should be maintained in his rights. But he, rebelling against the judgment of God, ceaseth not to attack us as enemies, this, my brother, and me, and he destroyeth our peoples with fire and pillage and the sword. That is the cause which hath united us afresh, and as we trove that ye doubt the soundness of our alliance and our fraternal union, we have resolved to bind ourselves afresh by this oath in your presence, being led there too by no prompting of wicked covetousness, but only that we may secure our common advantage in case that, by your aid, God should cause us to obtain peace. If then I violate, which God forbid, this oath that I am about to take to my brother, I hold you all quit of submission to me, and of the faith ye have sworn to me. Charles repeated this speech, word for word, to his own troops, in the Romance language, in that idiom derived from a mixture of Latin and of the tongues of ancient Gaul, and spoken, thence forth with varieties of dialect and pronunciation, in nearly all parts of Frankish Gaul. After this address, Louis pronounced and Charles repeated after him, each in his own tongue, the oath couched in these terms. For the love of God, for the Christian people, and for our common wheel, from this day forth, and so long as God shall grant me power and knowledge, I will defend this, my brother, and will be an aid to him in everything, as one ought to defend his brother, provided that he do no likewise unto me, and I will never make with Lothair any covenant which may be, to my knowledge, to the damage of this, my brother. When the two brothers had thus sworn, the two armies, officers and men, took in their turn a similar oath, going bale in a mass for the engagements of their kings. Then they took up their quarters, all of them, for some time, between Verne and Miens, and followed up their political proceedings with military fets, precursors of the nightly tournaments of the Middle Ages. A place of meeting was fixed, says the contemporary historian Nithard, at a spot suitable for this kind of exercises. Here were drawn up, on one side, a certain number of combatants, Saxons, Vasconians, Austrasians, or Britons. There were two ranged on the opposite side, an equal number of warriors, and the two divisions advanced, each against the other as if to attack. One of them, with their bucklers at their backs, took to flight, as if to seek in the main body shelter against those who were pursuing them. Then suddenly, facing about, they dashed in pursuit of those before whom they had just been flying. This sport lasted until the two kings, appearing with all the youth of their suits, rode up at a gallop, brandishing their spears and chasing first one lot and then the other. It was a fine sight to see so much temper amongst so many valiant folks, for great as were the number and the mixture of different nationalities, no one was insulted or maltreated, though the contrary is often the case amongst men in small numbers and known to one another. After four or five months of tentative measures, or of incidents which taught both parties that they could not, either of them, hope to completely destroy their opponents, the two allied brothers received at Verdun, whether they had repaired to concert their next movement, a messenger from Lothair, with peaceful proposals which they were unwilling to reject. The principle was that, with the exception of Italy, Aquitaine and Bavaria, to be secured without dispute to their then possessors, the Frankish Empire should be divided into three portions, that the arbiters elected to preside over the partition should swear to make it as equal as possible, and that Lothair should have his choice, with the title of emperor. About mid-June, 842, the three brothers met on an island of the Sone, near Chalon, where they began to discuss questions which divided them. But it was not till more than a year after, in August 843, that assembling all three of them with their umpires at Verdun, they at last came to an agreement about the partition of the Frankish Empire, save the three countries which it had been beforehand agreed to accept. Louis kept all the provinces of Germany, of which he was already in possession, and received, besides, on the left bank of the Rhine, the towns of Mayentz, Verm and Spire, with the territory appertaining to them. Lothair, for his part, had the eastern belt of Gaul, bounded on one side by the Rhine and the Alps, on the other by the courses of the Mus, the Sone and the Rhone, starting from the confluence of the two latter rivers, and further the country comprised between the Mus and the Shelt, together with certain countships lying to the west of that river. To Charles fell the rest of Gaul, Vasconia or Biscayne, Montimania, the marches of Spain, beyond the Pyrenees, and the other countries of southern Gaul which had enjoyed hitherto, under the title of the Kingdom of Aquitaine, a special government subordinated to the general government of the Empire, but distinct from it, lost this last remnant of their Gallo-Roman nationality, and became integral portions of Frankish Gaul, which fell by partition to Charles the Bald, and formed one in the same kingdom under one in the same king. The Mus fell through and disappeared in 843 by virtue of the Treaty of Verdun, the Second of Charlemagne's Grand Designs, the resuscitation of the Roman Empire by means of the Frankish and Christian Masters of Gaul. The name of Emperor still retained a certain value in the minds of the people, and still remained an object of ambition to princes, but the Empire was completely abolished, and in its stead sprang up three kingdoms, independent one of another, without any necessary connection or relation. One of the three was thenceforth France. In this great event are comprehended two facts, the disappearance of the Empire and the formation of the three kingdoms which took its place. The first is easily explained. The resuscitation of the Roman Empire had been a dream of ambition and ignorance on the part of a great man, but a barbarian. Political unity and central absolute power had been the essential characteristics of that Empire. They became introduced and established through a long succession of ages on the ruins of the splendid Roman Republic, destroyed by its own dissensions under favour of the still great influence of the old Roman Senate, though fallen from its high estate, and beneath the guardianship of the Roman legions and imperial Praetorians. Not one of these conditions, not one of these forces, was to be met with in the Roman world reigned over by Charlemagne. The nation of the Franks and Charlemagne himself were a butt of yesterday. The new Emperor had neither ancient Senate to hedge at the same time that it obeyed him, nor old bodies of troops to support him. Political unity and absolute power were repugnant alike to the intellectual and to the social condition, to the national manners and personal sentiments of the victorious barbarians. The necessity of placing their conquests beyond the reach of a new swarm of barbarians and the personal ascendancy of Charlemagne were the only things which gave his government a momentary gleam of success in the way of unity and a facist despotism under the name of empire. In 814 Charlemagne had made territorial security and accomplished fact, but the personal power he had exercised disappeared with him. The new Gallo-Frankish community recovered under the mighty but gradual influence of Christianity its proper and natural course, producing disruption into different local communities and bold struggles for individual liberties, either one with another or against whosoever tried to become their master. As for the second fact, the formation of the three kingdoms which were the issue of the Treaty of Verdun, various explanations have been given of it. This distribution of certain peoples of Western Europe into three distinct and independent groups, Italians, Germans, and French, has been attributed at one time to a diversity of histories and manners, at another to geographical causes and to what is called the rule of natural frontiers, and often are still to a spirit of nationality and to differences of language. Let none of these causes be gainsaid. They all exercised some sort of influence, but they are all incomplete in themselves and far too redolent of theoretical system. It is true that Germany, France, and Italy began, at that time, to emerge from the chaos into which they had been plunged by barbaric invasion and the conquest of Charlemagne, and to form themselves into quite distinct nations. But there were in each of the kingdoms of Lothair, of Louis the Germanic and of Charles the Bold, populations widely differing in race, language, manners, and geographical affinity, and it required many great events and the lapse of many centuries to bring about the degree of national unity they now possess. To say nothing touching the agency of individual and independent forces, which is always considerable, although so many men of intellect ignore it in the present day, what would have happened had any one of the three new kings, Lothair or Louis the Germanic or Charles the Bold, been a second Charlemagne, as Charlemagne had been a second Charles Martel. Who can say that in such a case the three kingdoms would have taken the form they took in 843? Happily or unhappily it was not so. None of Charlemagne's successors was capable of exercising on the events of his time, by virtue of his brain and his own will, any notable influence. Not that they were all unintelligent or timid or indolent. It has been seen that Louis the Devonair did not lack virtues and good intentions, and Charles the Bald was clear-sided, dexterous and energetic. He had a taste for information and intellectual distinction. He liked and sheltered men of learning and letters, and to such purpose that, instead of speaking as under Charlemagne of the School of the Palace, people called the Palace of Charles the Bald the Palace of the School. Amongst the eleven kings who after him ascended the Carlovigian throne, several such as Louis the Third and Carlemagne especially, several such as Louis the Third and Carlemagne, and especially Louis the Ultramarine, Dutramère, and Lothair, displayed on several occasions energy and courage, and the kings elected at this epoch, without the pale of the Carlovigian dynasty, Eudes in 887 and Raoul in 923, gave proofs of a valor both discreet and effectual. The Carlovigians did not, as the Marovigians did, end in monkish retirement or shameful inactivity, even the last of them, and the only one termed sluggard Louis the Fifth was getting ready when he died for an expedition in Spain against the Saracens. The truth is that, mediocre or undecided or adepated as they may have been, they all succumbed internally and externally, without initiating and without resisting to the course of events, and that in 987 the fall of the Carlovigian line was the natural and easily accomplished consequence of the new social condition which had been preparing in France CHAPTER XIII. THE READER HAS JUST SEEN THAT TWENTY-NINE YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF Charlemagne, that is, in 843, when by the Treaty of Verdun, the sons of Louis the Debonair had divided amongst them his dominions, the great empire split up into three distinct and independent kingdoms, the kingdoms of Italy, Germany, and France. The split did not stop there. Forty-five years later, at the end of the ninth century, shortly after the death of Charles the Fat, the last of the Carlovigians who appears to have reunited for a while all the empire of Charlemagne, this empire had begotten seven instead of three kingdoms, those of France, of Navarre, of Provence, or Sussjuryn Burgundy, of Transjuryn Burgundy, or Lorraine, of Alemania, and of Italy. This is what had become of the factious and ephemeral unity of that empire of the West which Charlemagne had wished to put in the place of the Roman Empire. We will leave where they are the three distinct and independent kingdoms and turn our introspective gaze upon the kingdom of France. There we recognize the same fact. There the same work of dismemberment is going on. About the end of the ninth century there were already twenty-nine provinces or fragments of provinces which had become petty states, the former governors of which, under the names of Dukes, Counts, Marquises, and Viscounts, were pretty nearly real sovereigns. Twenty-nine great fives, which have played a special part in French history, date back to this epic. These petty states were not all of equal importance or in possession of a perfectly similar independence. There were certain ties uniting them to other states, resulting in certain reciprocal obligations which became the basis, or one might say, the constitution of the feudal community, but their prevailing feature was nevertheless isolation, personal existence. They were really petty states begotten from the dismemberment of a great territory. Those local governments were formed at the expense of a central power. From the end of the ninth we passed to the end of the tenth century, to the epic when the Capetians take the place of the Carlovingians. Instead of seven kingdoms to replace the Empire of Charlemagne, there were then no more than four. The kingdoms of Provence and Transjuryn Burgundy had formed, by reunion, the Kingdom of Ar. The Kingdom of Lorraine was no more than a duchy in dispute between Alemania and France. The Emperor, also the Great, had united the Kingdom of Italy to the Empire of Alemania. Overtures had produced their effects amongst the Great States. But in the interior of the Kingdom of France dismemberment had held on its course, and instead of the twenty-nine petty states or great fives observable at the end of the ninth century, we find at the end of the tenth, fifty-five actually established. Videt, Guiseaux's Histoire de la Civilisation. Pages 238 to 244. Now how was this ever-increasing dismemberment accomplished? What causes determined it, and little by little made it the substitute for the unity of the Empire? Two causes, perfectly natural and independent of all human calculation, one moral and the other political. They were the absence from the minds of men of any general and dominant idea, and the reflux in social relations and manners of the individual liberties but lately repressed or regulated by the strong hand of Charlemagne. In times of formation or transition states and governments conformed to the measure, one had almost said to the height of the men of the period, their ideas, their sentiments, and their personal force of character. When ideas are few and narrow, when sentiments spread only over a confined circle, when means of action and expansion are wanting to mend, communities become petty and local, just as the thoughts and existence of their members are. Such was the state of things in the ninth and tenth centuries. There was no general and fructifying idea, save the Christian creed, no great intellectual vent, no great national feeling, no easy and rapid means of communication. Mind and life were both confined in a narrow space and encountered at every step stoppages and obstacles well nigh insurmountable. At the same time, by the fall of the empires of Rome and of Charlemagne, men regained possession of the rough and ready individual liberties which were the essential characteristic of Germanic manners. Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Saxons, Lombards, none of these new peoples had lived as the Greeks and Romans had under the sway of an essentially political idea, the idea of city, state, and fatherland. They were free men and not citizens, comrades, not members of one in the same public body. They gave up their vagabond life, they settled upon a soil conquered by themselves and partitioned amongst themselves, and there they lived each by himself, master of himself and all that was his, family, servitors, husbandmen, and slaves. The territorial domain became the fatherland, and the owner remained a free man, a local and independent chieftain at his own risk and peril. And this, quite naturally, grew up feudal France, when the newcomers, settled in their new abodes, were no more swayed or hampered by the vain attempt to re-establish the Roman Empire. The consequences of such a state of things and of such a disposition of persons were rapidly developed. Territorial ownership became the fundamental characteristic of and warranty for independence and social importance. Local sovereignty, if not complete and absolute, at least in respect of its principal rights, right of making more, right of judicature, right of taxation, and right of regulating the police, became one with the territorial ownership, which before long grew to be hereditary, whether under the title of IU, I Lodium, it had been originally perfectly independent and exempt from any feudal tie, or under the title of benefits, had arisen from grants of land made by the chieftain to his followers on condition of certain obligations. The offices, that is, the diverse functions, military or civil, conferred by the king on his legias, also ended by becoming hereditary. Having become established in fact, this airship in lands and local powers was soon recognized by the law. A capitulary of Charles the Bald, promulgated in 877, contains the two following provisions. If, after our death, any one of our legias, moved by love for God and our person, desire to renounce the world, and if he have a son or other relative capable of serving the public wheel, let him be free to transmit to him his benefices and his honour, according to his pleasure. If a count of this kingdom happened to die, and his son be about our person, we will that our son, together with those of our legias, who may chance to be the nearest relatives of the deceased count, as well as with the other officers of the said countship and the bishop of the diocese wherein it is situated, shall provide for its administration until the death of the here-to-four count shall have been announced to us, and we have been able to confer on the son, present at our court, the honours wherewith his father was invested. Thus the king still retained the nominal right of conferring on the son the offices or local functions of the father, but he recognized in the son the right to obtain him. A host of documents testify that at this epoch, when, on the death of a governor of a province, the king attempted to give his countship to someone else than his descendants, not only did personal interest resist, but such a measure was considered a violation of right. Under the reign of Louis the Stutterer, son of Charles the Bald, two of his legias, Vilhelm and Engelschok, held two countships on the confines of Bavaria, and at their death their offices were given to Count Arbo to the prejudice of their sons. The children and their relatives, says the chronicler, taking that as a gross injustice, said that matters ought to go differently, and that they would die by the sword or Arbo should give up the countship of their family. Airship in territorial ownership and their local rights, whatever may have originally been their character, airship in local offices or powers, military or civil, primarily conferred by the king and, by consequence, hereditary union of territorial ownership and local government, under the condition, a little confused and precarious, of subordinate relations and duties between César and Vassal, such was, in law and in fact, the feudal order of things. From the ninth to the tenth century it had acquired full force. This order of things, being thus well defined, we find ourselves face-to-face with an indisputable historic fact. No period, no system, has ever, in France, remained so odious to the public instincts. And this antipathy is not peculiar to our age, nor merely the fruit of that great revolution which, not long since separated, as by gulf, the French present from its past. Go back to any portion of the French history, and stop where you will, and you will everywhere find the feudal system considered, by the mass of the population, a foe to be fought and fought down at any price. At all times, whoever dealt it a blow has been popular in France. The reasons for this fact are not all, or even the chief of them, to be traced to the evils, which in France the people had to endure under the feudal system. It is not evil plight which is most detested and feared by peoples. They have more than once borne, faced, and almost rooted, and there are woeful epics, the memory of which has remained dear. It is in the political character of feudalism, in the nature and shape of its power, that we find lurking that element of popular aversion which, in France at least, it has never ceased to inspire. It was a confederation of petty sovereigns, of petty despots, unequal amongst themselves, and having one towards another certain duties and rights, but invested in their own domains, over their personal and direct subjects, with arbitrary and absolute power. This is the essential element of the feudal system. Therein it differs from every other aristocracy, every other form of government. There has been no scarcity in this world of aristocracies and despotisms. There have been peoples arbitrarily governed, nay absolutely possessed by a single man, by a college of priests, by a body of patricians. But none of these despotic governments was like the feudal system. In the case where the sovereign power has been placed in the hands of a single man, the condition of the people has been servile and woeful. At the bottom the feudal system was somewhat better, and it will presently be explained why. Meanwhile it must be acknowledged that the condition often appeared less burdensome and obtained more easy acceptance than the feudal system. It was because, under the great absolute monarchies, men did, nevertheless, obtain some sort of equality and tranquility. A shameful equality and a fatal tranquility, no doubt, but such as peoples are sometimes contented with under the dominance of certain circumstances or in the last gasp of their existence. Liberty, equality, and tranquility were all alike wanting, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, to the inhabitants of each lord's domains. Their sovereign was at their very doors, and none of them was hidden from him or beyond reach of his mighty arm. Of all tyrannies the worst is that which can thus keep account of its subjects and which sees, from its seat, the limits of its empire. The caprices of the human will then show themselves in all their intolerable extravagance, and moreover with irresistible promptness. It is then, too, that inequality of conditions makes itself more rudely felt. Riches, might, independence, every advantage and every right present themselves every instant to the gaze of misery, weakness, and servitude. The inhabitants of fives could not find consolation in the bosom of tranquility incessantly mixed up in the quarrels of their lord, a prey to his neighbor's devastations. They led a life still more precarious and still more restless than that of the lord's themselves, and they had to put up at one in the same time with the presence of war, privilege, and absolute power. Nor did the rule of feudalism differ less from that of a college of priests or a senate of patricians than from the despotism of an individual. In the two former systems we have an aristocratic body governing the mass of the people. In the feudal system we have an aristocracy resolved into individuals, each of whom governs on his own private account a certain number of persons dependent upon him alone. Be the aristocratic body a clergy, its power has its root in creeds which are common to itself and its subjects. Now, in every creed common to those who command and those who obey, there is a moral tie, an element of sympathetic equality, and on the part of those who obey a tacit adhesion to the rule. Be it a senate of patricians that reigns, it cannot govern so capriciously, so arbitrarily as an individual. There are differences and discussions in the very bosom of the government. There may be, nay, there always are, formed factions, parties which, in order to arrive at their own ends, strive to conciliate the favor of the people. Sometimes take in hand its interests, and however bad may be its condition, the people, by sharing in its master's rivalries, exercises some sort of influence over its own destiny. Futilism was not, properly speaking, an aristocratic government, a senate of kings, to use the language used by Cineus to Pyrrhus. It was a collection of individual despotisms, exercised by isolated aristocrats, each of whom, being sovereign in his own domains, had to give no account to another, and ask nobody's opinion about his conduct toward his subjects. Is it astonishing that such a system incurred, on the part of the peoples, more hatred than even those which had reduced them to a more monotonous and more lasting servitude? There was despotism, just as in pure monarchies, and there was privilege, just as in the very closest aristocracies. And both obtruded themselves in the most offensive, and, so to speak, crude form. Despotism was not tapered off by means of the distant and elevation of a throne, and privilege did not veil itself behind the majesty of a large body. Both were the appurtenances of an individual ever present and ever alone, ever at his subjects' doors, and never called upon, in dealing with their lot, to gather his peers around him. And now we will leave the subjects in the case of feudalism, and consider the masters, the owners of the fiefs, and their relations one with another. We here behold quite a different spectacle. We see liberties, rights, and guarantees, which not only give protection and honor to those who enjoy them, but of which the tendency and effect are open to the subject population and outlet towards a better future. It could not, in fact, be otherwise, for on the one hand feudal society was not wanting indignity and glory, and on the other the feudal system did not, as the theocracy of Egypt or the despotism of Asia did, condemn its subjects irretrievably to slavery. It oppressed them, but they ended by having the power as well as the will to go free. It is the fault of pure monarchy to set up power so high and encompass it with such splendor that the possessor's head is turned, and that those who are beneath it dare scarcely to look upon it. The sovereign thinks himself a god, and the people fall down and worship him. But it was not so in society under the owners of fiefs. The grandeur was neither dazzling nor unapproachable. It was but a short step from Vassal to Suzerain. They lived familiarly one with another without any possibility that superiority should think itself illimitable, or subordination think itself servile. Thence came that extension of the domestic circle, that ennoblement of personal service, from which sprang one of the most generous sentiments of the Middle Ages, fealty, which reconciled the dignity of the man with the devotion of the Vassal. Further, it was not from a numerous aristocratic senate, but from himself, and almost from himself alone, that every possessor of fiefs derived his strength and his luster. Isolated as he was in his domains, it was for him to maintain himself therein, to extend them, to keep his subjects submissive and his vassals faithful, and to correct those who were wanting an obedience to him, or who ignored their duties as members of the feudal hierarchy. It was, as it were, a people consisting of scattered citizens, of whom each, ever armed, accompanied by his following or entrenched in his castle, kept watch himself over his own safety and his own rights, relying far more on his own courage and his own renown than on the protection of the public authorities. Such a condition bears less resemblance to an organized and settled society than to a constant prospect of peril and war, but the energy and the dignity of the individual were kept up in it, and a more extended and better regulated society might issue therefrom. And it did issue. This society of the future was not slow to sprout and grow in the midst of that feudal system so turbulent, so oppressive, so detested. For five centuries, from the invasion of the barbarians to the fall of the Carlovingians, France presents the appearance of being stationary in the middle of chaos. Over this long, dark space of anarchy, feudalism is slowly taking shape, at the expense, at one time, of liberty, at another, of order, not as a real rectification of the social condition, but as the only order of things which could possibly acquire fixity, as, in fact, a sort of unpleasant but necessary alternative. No sooner is the feudal system in force than with its victory scarcely secured, it is attacked in the lower grades by the mass of the people attempting to regain certain liberties, ownerships, and rights, and in the highest by royalty laboring to recover its public character, to become once more the head of a nation. It is no longer the case of free men in a vague and dubious position, unsuccessfully defending against the nomination of the chieftains whose lands they inhabit, the wreck of their independence, whether Golic, or Roman, or barbaric. It is the case of Burgesses, agriculturalists, and serfs, who know well what their grievances and who their oppressors are, and who are working to get free. It is no longer the case of a king doubtful about his title and the nature of his power, at one time a chieftain of warriors, at another the anointed of the most high, here a mayor of the palace of some sluggard barbarian, there the heir of the emperors of Rome, a sovereign tossing about confusedly amidst followers or servitors, eager at one time to invade his authority, at another to render themselves completely isolated. It is the case of one of the premier feudal lords exerting himself to become the master of all, to change his suzerainty into sovereignty. Thus, in spite of the servitude into which the people had sunk at the end of the tenth century, from this moment the enfranchisement of the people makes way. In spite of the weakness or rather nullity of the regal power at the same epic, from this moment the regal power begins to gain ground. That monarchical system which the genius of Charlemagne could not found, king's far inferior to Charlemagne will, little by little, make triumphant. Those liberties and those guarantees which the German warriors were incapable of transmitting to a well-regulated society, the commonality will regain one after another. Nothing but feudalism could have sprung from the womb of barbarism, but scarcely is feudalism established when we see monarchy and liberty nascent and growing in its womb.