William Walton - Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 1

While Sigebert was fighting the Avars, barbarians from Asia, on the eastern frontier, his two brothers amused themselves by pillaging his western provinces. Chilpéric had taken, for a most unwilling bride, a younger sister of Brunehaut, Galswinthe, daughter of a king of the Visigoths, notwithstanding the fierce jealousy of his mistress, or his first wife, Frédégonde; her empire was, however, soon regained, and Galswinthe was strangled in her sleep. Brunehaut incited her husband, Sigebert, to a war of vengeance; Paris was taken, and Chilpéric only saved from ruin by his wife, who despatched two assassins against the King of the Neustriens. The rights of inheritance of her son, Clotaire, were impaired by the existence of two sons of Chilpéric by a former marriage. One of them, Mérovée, imprudently married the widowed Brunehaut, and his step-mother sent him to rejoin Sigebert. The Bishop of Rouen, Prétextat, who had already narrowly escaped with his life, in Paris, from the terrible queen, had blessed this marriage; he was killed on the steps of the altar while celebrating mass. Clovis, the brother of Mérovée, followed; then one of his sisters, and Audovère, the mother. The king left Paris for Chelles one afternoon, for the chase; he had previously entered his wife's apartment while she was occupied with her toilette and struck her playfully on the shoulder with a light wand,—the queen mistook him for another, and answered, without turning round: " Tout beau! Landry," and other words of great familiarity. Then she perceived her error, and the king went out without a word; as he dismounted, on his return, some one slipped a knife into his heart, "and no one thought it worth while to run after the murderer."

Charibert, the short-lived king of Paris, had in his royal palace a serf named Leudaste, who, when a fellow-servant, Markowefe, attracted the monarch's favor and was made queen, contrived to ingratiate himself with her to such an extent that he was made grand equerry and, later, Comte de Tours. In his administration he proved himself capable of every outrage; but the death of Charibert compelled him to seek refuge with Chilpéric, and he endeavored to win Frédégonde's favor as he had Markowefe's. When Tours fell into the hands of Chilpéric, in 574, Leudaste was re-established in his office and resumed his old practices; two years later, upon a petition addressed to the king by the bishop, Saint Grégoire de Tours, he was dismissed. Thereupon he hatched a plot against the bishop and against the queen who had not interposed to save him; he declared to the king that the former had conspired to deliver Tours to the King of Austrasie, and that the queen had done him an even greater wrong, and he offered to produce witnesses. But his case fell to the ground; the king, threatened with excommunication by the clergy for bringing false charges against the revered prelate, threw all the responsibility upon Leudaste, and that individual, diligently sought for, had prudently disappeared.

He was accordingly solemnly excommunicated and declared anathema "from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet." After some two years passed in pillage and debauchery at the head of an organized band of brigands in the domains of Gontran, he obtained permission to return to Tours, and had the audacity to come and seek his pardon at the court of Neustrie. Chilpéric tolerated his presence, but advised him to avoid the queen. As the sovereigns were one day attending mass in the basilica of Paris, Leudaste entered boldly, traversed the crowd, and knelt at the feet of Frédégonde, imploring her forgiveness. The king had him expelled from the church, but, instead of taking warning, he lingered in the shops around the market-place in the Cité, selecting jewels and rich stuffs with which to propitiate the queen; when she issued from the church and saw him, she despatched her guards to arrest him; one of them was wounded, and another gave him a sword-cut over the head; as he fled across the Petit-Pont, he fell and broke his leg. The manner and quality of a torture that should be appropriate for him were carefully discussed by the royal pair; he was tended by eminent physicians that he might be duly strengthened for it; but when Frédégonde learned that gangrene had appeared in his wounds, she had him dragged from his bed, stretched on the pavement with his neck on a great iron bar, and his head crushed by another heavy bar in the hands of the executioner.

After the murder of Chilpéric, the people began to murmur, and the gentle King Gontran, according to Saint Grégoire of Tours, "in order to put an end to the evil custom of killing kings, went one day to a church where all the people were assembled for the mass, commanded silence through a deacon, and said: 'I conjure you, men and women who are here present, keep for me an assured fidelity, and do not kill me as you have lately killed my brothers. Allow me to live at least two or three years, that I may educate my young nephews, for fear that, after my death, it should happen that you should perish with these children, since there will remain of all my family no man strong enough to defend you.'"

Nevertheless, he had the courage to raise doubts as to the legitimacy of Frédégonde's son, Clotaire, and to postpone his baptism till she produced three bishops and three hundred other witnesses in his favor. Brunehaut's son, Childebert, was threatening the queen with an armed force; he and Gontran agreed to be each the other's heir in case they died without children, and on Gontran's death Childebert endeavored to take possession of Clotaire's domains also. Frédégonde had him poisoned: the dreary series of civil war and family murders began again; Clotaire II became in the end sole king of the Franks, and his mother died in her bed, "full of years." Her rival, Brunehaut, less fortunate, betrayed by her own followers, was, by Clotaire's orders, tied naked to the tail of a wild horse and dragged to death.

Such were the manners and customs of the Mérovingians.

There are various accounts of the two patron saints of France and Paris. It is to Grégoire de Tours that we owe our first knowledge of Saint Denis, who, according to his statement, came to preach Christianity in Lutetia in the year 245, with the friar Rustique and the deacon Eleuthère. Dionysius, bishop of the Parisians, he says, full of zeal for the name of Christ, suffered many persecutions, and finally martyrdom. Other historians assign to Saint Martin, rather than to Saint Denis, the glory of having converted the Gauls to Christianity; some place his mission even before the year 100, and the Abbé Hilduin confounds him with Saint Denis the Areopagite. But, according to Grégoire, Denis, Rustique, and Eleuthère were beheaded in the year 272, by order of the préfet Percennius, on a mountain situated near Paris, which accordingly took the name of the Mont des Martyrs (Montmartre). The préfet had given orders to have the bodies thrown into the Seine, but a Roman lady, named Catulla, although not a Christian herself, caused them to be sought for in the night and piously buried in a locality known as Catolocus. Grain was sown over the graves, and when the fury of persecution was passed, they were disinterred and deposited in a tomb.

According to the popular legend (to which the municipal and national authority has given a sort of official sanction by M. Bonnat's very vigorous and realistic presentation on the walls of the Panthéon), after having had his head struck off, the saint arose on his feet, picked it up and walked away, carrying the severed organ in his hands, to the great surprise of the spectators. In this manner he traversed the space of a league, till he came to the spot where his church now stands, the angels meanwhile chanting around him Gloria tibi Domine , and others repeating three times the Alleluia . It was this unusual promenade that gave rise to the well-known proverb that it is only the first step that costs.