The work that Denis and his companions began was more fully achieved in the fourth century by the rude Pannonion soldier, St. Martin, who also evangelised at Paris. He is the best-known of Gallic saints, and the story of his conversion one of the most popular in Christendom. When stationed at Amiens he was on duty one bitter cold day at the city gate, and espied a poor naked beggar asking alms. Soldiers in garrison are notoriously impecunious, and Martin had nothing to give; but drawing his sword he cleaved his mantle in twain, and bestowed half upon the shivering wretch at his feet. That very night the Lord Jesus appeared to him in a dream surrounded by angels, having on His shoulders the half of the cloak which Martin had given to the beggar. Turning to the angels, Jesus said: “Know ye who hath thus arrayed Me? My servant Martin, though yet unbaptised, hath done this.” After this vision Martin received baptism and remained steadfast in the faith. At length, desiring to devote himself wholly to Christ, he begged permission to leave the army. The Emperor Julian, who deemed the Christian faith fit only to form souls of slaves, reproached him for his cowardice, for he was yet in the prime of life, being forty years of age. “Put me,” exclaimed Martin, “naked and without defence in the forefront of the battle, and armed with the Cross alone I will not fear to face the enemy.” Early on the following morning the barbarians submitted to the emperor without striking a blow, and thus was victory vouchsafed to Martin’s faith and courage, and he was permitted to leave the army. The illiterate and dauntless soldier became the fiery apostle of the faith, a vigorous iconoclast, throwing down the images of the false gods, breaking their altars in pieces and burning their temples. Of the Roman gods, Mercury, he said, was most difficult to ban, but Jove was merely stupid[13] and brutish, and gave him least trouble. Martin was a democratic saint, of ardent charity and austere devotion. Later in life he founded the monastery of Marmoutier, which grew to be one of the richest in France. His rule was severe; when his monks murmured at the hard fare he bade them remember that cooked herbs and barley bread was the food of the hermits of Africa. “That may be,” answered they, “but we cannot live like the angels.”
On the 16th of March 1711, some workmen, digging a tomb for the archbishop of Paris in the choir of Notre Dame, came upon the walls, six feet below the pavement, of the original Christian basilica over which the modern cathedral is built. In the fabric of these walls the early builders had incorporated the remains of the still earlier temple of Jupiter, which had been destroyed to give place to the Christian church, and among the débris were found the fragments of an altar raised to Jove in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar by the Nautæ, a guild of Parisian merchant-shippers, an altar on whose foyer still remained some of the very burnt wood and incense used in the last pagan sacrifice. The mutilated stones, with their rude Gallo-Roman reliefs and inscriptions, may be seen in the Frigidarium of the Thermæ, the old Roman baths by the Hôtel de Cluny, and are among the most interesting of historical documents in Paris. The Corporation of Nautæ who dedicated this altar to Jove, were the origin of the Commune or Civil Council of Paris, and in later time gave way to the provost[14] of the merchants and the sheriffs of that city. Their device was the Nef, or ship, which is and has been throughout the ages the arms of Paris, and which to this day may be seen carved on the vaultings of the Roman baths.
In the great palace of which these baths formed but a part was enacted that scene so vividly described in the pages of Gibbon, when Julian, after his victories over the Alemanni and the Franks, was acclaimed Augustus by the rebellious troops of Constantius. On a plain outside Paris Julian had admonished the sullen legions, angry at being detached from their victorious and darling commander for service on the Persian frontier, and had urged them to obedience. But at midnight the young Cæsar was awakened by a clamorous and armed multitude besieging the palace, and at early dawn its doors were forced; the reluctant Julian was seized and carried in triumph through the streets to be enthroned and saluted as emperor. He was lifted on a shield, and for diadem, crowned with a military collar. In after life the emperor-philosopher looked back with tender regret to the three winters he spent in Paris before his elevation to the imperial responsibilities and anxieties. He writes of the busy days and meditative nights he passed in his dear Lutetia, with its two wooden bridges, its pure and pleasant waters, its excellent wine. He dwells on the mildness of its climate, where the fig-tree, protected by straw in the winter, grew and fruited. One rigorous season, however, the emperor well remembered[15] when the Seine was blocked by huge masses of ice. Julian, who prided himself on his endurance, at first declined the use of those charcoal fires which to this day are a common and deadly method of supplying heat in Paris. But his rooms were damp and his servants were allowed to introduce them into his sleeping apartment. The Cæsar was almost asphyxiated by the fumes, and his physicians to restore him administered an emetic. Julian in his time was beloved of the Lutetians, for he was a just and tolerant prince whose yoke was easy. He had purged the soil of Gaul from the barbarian invaders, given Lutetia peace and security, and made of it an important, imperial city. His statue, found near Paris, still recalls his memory in the hall of the great baths of the Lutetia he loved so well.
The so-called apostasy of this lover of Plato and worshipper of the Sun, who never went to the wars or travelled without dragging a library of Greek authors after him, was a philosophic reaction against the harsh measures,[16] the bloody and treacherous natures of the Christian emperors, and the fierceness of the Arian controversy. The movement was but a back-wash in the stream of history, and is of small importance. Julian’s successors, Valentinian and Gratian, reversed his policy but shared his love for the fair city on the Seine, and spent some winters there. Lutetia had now become a rich and cultured Gallo-Roman city.
CHAPTER II
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS—ST. GENEVIEVE—THE CONVERSION OF CLOVIS—THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY
IN the Prologue to Faust the Lord of Heaven justifies the existence of the restless, goading spirit of evil by the fact that man’s activity is all too prone to flag,—
“Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh.”[17]
As with men so with empires: riches and inaction are hard to bear. It was not so much a corruption of public morals as a growing slackness and apathy in public life and an intellectual sloth that hastened the fall of the Roman Empire. Owing to the gradual exhaustion of the supply of slaves its economic basis was crumbling away. The ruling class was content to administer rather than to govern and unwilling or incompetent to grapple with the new order of things.[18] For centuries the Gauls had been untrained in arms and habituated to look to the imperial legions for defence against the half-savage races of men, giants in stature and strength, surging like an angry sea against their boundaries. Towards the end of the fourth century Vandals and Burgundians, Suevi and Alemanni, Goth and Hun, treading on each other’s heels, burst through the Rhine frontier, destroyed the Roman garrisons and forts, and inundated Gaul. Two of these races stayed to form kingdoms: the Burgundians in the fertile plains of the Rhine; the Visigoths in Aquitaine and North Spain, whose aid the Romans were fain to seek to roll back the hordes of Attila’s Huns at Chalons-sur-Marne. This was the last achievement of Roman arms in Gaul, and even that victory was largely due to the courage of the Goths. In the fifth century the confederation of Frankish tribes who had conquered and settled in Belgium saw successive waves of invasion pass by, and determined to have their part in the spoils of Gaul. They soon overran Flanders and the north, and at length under Clovis captured Paris and conquered nearly the whole of Gaul.