towards his family and his people, asked him if he were fully resolved to fulfil them, and, at the answer that he was, bade 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 hast granted me grace to see with mine own 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 Eginhard, “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 the 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 that he had taken to his bed, having received the holy communion,” he expired about nine A.M., on Saturday, the 28th of January, 814, in his seventy-first year.

“After performance of ablutions and funeral duties, 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 814, in the seventh year of the Indiction, on the 5th of the Kalends 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.