to prayer; the king came back the next day, and the bishop gave him a paper on which was written by a divine hand, he said, “The pardon granted to royal offences which might not be revealed.”  Clovis accepted this absolution, and loaded the church of Tournai with his gifts.  In 511, the very year of his death, his last act in life was the convocation at Orleans of a Council, which was attended by thirty bishops from the different parts of his kingdom, and at which were adopted thirty-one canons that, whilst granting to the Church great privileges and means of influence, in many cases favorable to humanity and respect for the rights of individuals, bound the Church closely to the State, and gave to royalty, even in ecclesiastical matters, great power.  The bishops, on breaking up, sent these canons to Clovis, praying him to give them the sanction of his adhesion, which he did.  A few months afterwards, on the 27th of November, 511, Clovis died at Paris, and was buried in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, nowadays St. Genevieve, built by his wife Queen Clotilde, who survived him.

It was but right to make the reader intimately acquainted with that great barbarian who, with all his vices and all his crimes, brought about, or rather began, two great matters which have already endured through fourteen centuries, and still endure; for he founded the French monarchy and Christian France.  Such men and such facts have a right to be closely studied and set in a clear light by history.  Nothing similar will be seen for two centuries, under the descendants of Clovis, the Merovingians; amongst them will be encountered none but those personages whom death reduces to insignificance, whatever may have been their rank in the world, and of whom Virgil thus speaks to Dante:—­

          “Non ragionam di for, ma guarda e passa.”

     “Waste we no words on them:  one glance and pass thou on.” 
                                        Inferno, Canto III.

CHAPTER VIII.—–­THE MEROVINGIANS.

[Illustration:  The Sluggard King Journeying——­156]

In its beginning and in its end the line of the Merovingians is mediocre and obscure.  Its earliest ancestors, Meroveus, from whom it got its name, and Clodion, the first, it is said, of the long-haired kings, a characteristic title of the Frankish kings, are scarcely historical personages; and it is under the qualification of sluggard kings that the last Merovingians have a place in history.  Clovis alone, amidst his vices and his crimes, was sufficiently great and did sufficiently great deeds to live forever in the course of ages; the greatest part of his successors belong only to genealogy or chronology.  In a moment of self-abandonment and weariness, the great Napoleon once said, “What trouble to take for half a page in universal history!” Histories far more limited and modest than a universal history, not only