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The occasion was an historic one, and they with their Merovingian hair, their beards, their waistcoats, and their enthusiasm helped to make it an unusually lively and picturesque occasion. I have quoted a very few of the good things which one may read in Gautier's Histoire du Romantisme. The narrative is one of much sweetness and humor.
His eldest son Hermenegild, who was invested by his father with the royal diadem, and the fair principality of Btica, contracted an honorable and orthodox alliance with a Merovingian princess, the daughter of Sigebert, king of Austrasia, and of the famous Brunechild.
The hope at Constantinople was that he would treat Theodoric the Ostrogoth as he had already treated Alaric; this was the first of many occasions on which the network of imperial diplomacy was woven round a Frankish king. Church and Empire conspired to inflame the ambitions and enlarge the schemes of Merovingian and Carolingian conquerors.
There are schoolgirls who fall ill and pine away because they are shown to have misplaced the name of Dagobert III in the list of Merovingian Monarchs, and quite fearless men will blush if they are found ignoring the family name of some peer.
In time, hermits came and built their cells on both the rocks and gradually a small community was formed under the Merovingian Abbey of Mandane. It was about this time, that is in the sixth century, that a great change came over the surroundings of the two rocks. Hitherto, they had formed rocky excrescences at the edge of the low forest-land by which the country adjoining the sea was covered.
And there is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very spot where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a convent of Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793. I have done my duty according to my powers, and all the good that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued, persecuted, blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed.
An awful travesty upon a court of justice was established in that historic hall in the Palais de Justice. Its walls, which had looked down upon generations of Merovingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian kings, now beheld the condemnation of the most innocent and well-intentioned of all the kings of France.
Probably the Arab account diminishes, but of the two keeps nearer to the truth. The Merovingian kings had sunk into absolute insignificance, and had become mere puppets of royalty before the eighth century.
Then for two hundred and fifty years France was under the Merovingian kings, and throughout much of this period there was very little settled government, Neustria, together with the rest of France, suffering from the lawlessness that prevailed under these "sluggard" kings. Rouen was still the centre of many of the events connected with the history of Neustria.
The British emigrant pauses ere he buys land thus enthralled; and almost all the old French families, who dated from Charlemagne, Clovis, or Pepin, from the Merovingian or Carlovingian monarchies, have disappeared and dwindled away, and their places have been supplied by the more enterprising, or the nouveau riche men of the old world, or by restless, acute lawyers, and metaphysical body-curers.
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