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The character which descended from this Gallo-Roman race to the later French nation was optimistic and beauty-loving, with a strength which has carried it through many dark days. It might be said to be responsible for the French sense of proportion and their freedom of judgment which has enabled them to hold their important place in the history of art and decoration.
They bore no outward relation to the soft and tall and sentimental North from which some few of their remote ancestry had drawn ancestral names. But on the other hand, anyone who should pretend that this amazing and ephemeral phenomenon, the Norman, was merely Gallo-Roman, would commit an error: an error far less gross but still misleading.
Going, going.... Some thirty-five years after the death of Ausonius, in the midst of the disastrous sixth century, was born Sidonius Apollinaris, Gallo-Roman aristocrat, father-in-law of an emperor, sometime prefect of Rome and in the end Bishop of Clermont. Much had happened between the death of Ausonius and his birth. The lights were going out all over Europe.
To Charles fell all the rest of Gaul: Vasconia or Biscaye, Septimania, 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 and the same kingdom under one and the same king.
They possessed, if one may so speak, their diocese, for in these regions separated from the rest of Christianity nothing was known of the power of Rome and of the religious institutions which prevailed in the Latin world, or even in the Gallo-Roman towns of Rennes and Nantes, hard by.
But," he added, "as I am not descended from the Doges nor the Pilgrim Fathers, I, a poor, degenerate Gallo-Roman, fear the dampness on account of my rheumatism, and ask your permission to reenter the house." Then, as he passed through the door of the salon: "Raphael, a builder! Titian, an upholsterer! Lorenzetti, a reproducer!" he repeated to himself.
In time the position occupied by Rotomagos became recognised as one having greater strategical advantages than Juliabona, a little further down the river, and this Gallo-Roman precursor of the modern Rouen became the headquarters of the provincial governor. The site of Rotomagos would appear to include the Palais de Justice and the Cathedral of the present day.
Many objects illustrating the pre-historic and most ancient periods of French history have been found at Baume; bronze weapons and ornaments, Gallo-Roman relics, tombs, statuettes, &c., whilst a Roman camp, the largest in the Jura, has been traced on the summit of the rocks. This was destined to protect the road from Lyons to the Rhine, and occupied the height known as Mount Sermus.
Among the first of Gallo-Roman cities, she was also among the first to suffer. Chrocus and his horde who sacked Orange, seized her Bishop and murdered him; and Alains, Vandals, and Burgundians, following in their wake, brought disaster after disaster to the cities lying near the Rhone. Vaison, by miracle, did not lose her prestige.
There are no records of cats between that period in Egypt, about 1630 B.C., and 260 B.C., when they seem to have become acclimated in Greece and Rome. There is in the Bordeaux Museum an ancient picture of a young girl holding a cat, on a tomb of the Gallo-Roman Epoch, and cats appeared in the heraldry of that date; but writers of those ages speak rather slightingly of them.
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