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The house of Bourbon had become as effete as the house of Valois in the sixteenth century; as effete as the Merovingians and Carlovingians had become in a previous age; but the strong chain of hereditary right bound up the fortunes of a great empire with the feeble brain and bestial instincts of a Louis XV. This was the result of concentrating all the active force of the state in one predestined irremovable human being.

Thus it would appear that Philip was the legitimate representative, not only of the ancient races of French monarchs whether Merovingians, Carlovingians, or otherwise was not stated but also of the usurping houses themselves, by whose intrusion those earlier dynasties had been ejected, being the eldest male heir of the extinct line of Valois, while his daughter was, if possible, even more legitimately the sovereign and proprietor of France than he was himself.

The Franks in the early days of the Merovingians, by no means an estimable people, were probably purely Teuton; they separated more and more from their less civilized race-kindred, and by the time the Frankish Empire had reached its zenith its people had absorbed a good deal of other blood, which mixture crystallized into the French nation and soon broke away from any racial relations with the Teutons.

If the great material developments of the nineteenth century had been final, if they had, indeed, constituted merely a revolution and not an absolute release from the fixed conditions about which human affairs circled, we might even now be settling accounts with our Merovingians as the socialists desire. But these developments were not final, and one sees no hint as yet of any coming finality.

The supremacy among the Marattas passed to the Peshwas, the Bramin Ministers of the successors of Sivaji, who established a dynasty very much like that of the Mayors of the Palace in the Frankish Kingdom of the Merovingians.

Gregory the Great, of Leander, Bishop of Seville, and his brother Isidore, of Ildefonso of Toledo, and of many others of scarcely less renown in the early monastic records. Maur in Anjou and the propagation of the Benedictine rule there, of the relations previously existing between the monks and the Merovingians, of St.

He persuaded Childeric, the last of the Merovingians to become a monk and then made himself king with the approval of the other Germanic chieftains. But this did not satisfy the shrewd Pepin. He wanted to be something more than a barbarian chieftain.

Pepin had Neustria, Burgundy, Provence, and the suzerainty of Aquitaine; Carloman, Austrasia, Thuringia, and Allemannia. They both, at their father's death, took only the title of mayor of the palace, and, perhaps, of duke. The last but one of the Merovingians, Thierry IV., had died in 737. For four years there had been no king at all.

"Non ragionam di for, ma guarda e passa." "Waste we no words on them: one glance and pass thou on." Inferno, Canto III. In its beginning and in its end the line of the Merovingians is mediocre and obscure.

From the Merovingians dates the Louvre des Champs, the hostile, militant Louvre, with its high wood and stone tower, familiar only in old engravings. After this the moyen-age Louvre, attributable to Saint Louis and Charles V, with its great tower, its thick walls of stone and its deep-dug moats, came into being.