Several cities opened their gates to Attila: they hoped to find safety in submission; they did but expedite their destruction. Despair gave courage to others, but no heroism availed against these devouring hordes. Rheims and Arras were delivered over to the sack. The host broke up into fractions, which ravaged the country, carrying everywhere fire and sword.
Attila advanced to the Loire.
Then it was that a panic fell on the inhabitants of Paris. In madness of fear, they prepared to desert it: the rich in their chariots and waggons, the poor on foot.
It was now that S. Geneviève stood forward and rebuked their cowardice. Whither could they fly? The enemy penetrated everywhere. The Hun gained audacity by the universal panic. Better man their walls, brace their hearts, and resist heroically.
The Parisian mob, headlong and cruel, as such a mob has ever been, howled at her, and prepared to pelt her with stones and cast her into the Seine, when, opportunely, appeared the Archdeacon of Auxerre, sent expressly to Geneviève from the bishop, just returned from Britain, and now dying, bearing Blessed Bread to her, that he had sent in token of affectionate communion. This loaf, the eulogia, was that from which the bread for the Communion had been taken, and which remained over. It had been blessed, but not consecrated; and it was sent by bishops to those whom they held in esteem.
Such a token of regard paid to Geneviève by one so highly esteemed awed the rabble, and they swung from one temper to another. They were now amenable to her advice. They closed the gates, accumulated the munitions of war, and made preparations to stand a siege; but Attila did not approach. He foresaw that it would take him too long to reduce so strong a place. On the 14th of June, 451, the Huns encountered their first repulse. They were driven from the siege of Orleans. On the field of Châlons-sur-Marne, the memorable battle was fought between Aetius, the Roman general, and Attila. “It was a battle,” says the historian Jornandes, “which for atrocity, multitude, horror, and stubbornness has not had its like.” The field was heaped with the dead, but it resulted in the expulsion of the Huns from Gaul.
Feeling a great reverence for S. Denis, Geneviève desired greatly to build a church on the scene of his martyrdom; and she urged some priests to undertake the work. But they hesitated, saying that they had no means of burning lime—it was a lost art. Then, so runs the tale, one of them suddenly recollected having heard two swineherds in conversation on the bridge over the Seine. One had said to the other: “Whilst I was following one of my pigs the other day, I lit in the forest on an ancient abandoned lime-kiln.”
“That is no marvel,” answered the other, “for I found a sapling in the forest uprooted by the wind, and under its roots was an old kiln.”
The priests inquired where these kilns were and used them, and Geneviève set the priest Genes, who was afterwards her biographer, to superintend the work of building the church.
It shows to what a condition of degradation the art of building had fallen, when the Parisians were unable to burn lime without old Roman kilns for the purpose.