Our Fathers Have Told Us Part 3

"On se _croit_ en Republique, parce que quelques demi-quarterons de farceurs occupent les memes places, emargent les memes appointements, pratiquent les memes abus, que ceux qu'on a renverses a leur benefice.

"On se _croit_ un peuple opprime, heroque, que brise ses fers, et n'est qu'un domestique capricieux qui aime a changer de maitres.

"On _croit_ au genie d'avocats de sixieme ordre, qui ne se sont jetes dans la politique et n'aspirent au gouvernement despotique de la France que faute d'avoir pu gagner honnetement, sans grand travail, dans l'exercice d'un profession correcte, une vie obscure humectee de chopes.

"On _croit_ que des hommes devoyes, decla.s.ses, decaves, fruits secs, etc., qui n'ont etudie que le 'domino a quatre' et le 'bezigue en quinze cents' se reveillent un matin,--apres un sommeil alourdi par le tabac et la biere--possedant la science de la politique, et l'art de la guerre; et aptes a etre dictateurs, generaux, ministres, prefets, sous-prefets, etc.

"Et les soi-disant conservateurs eux-memes _croient_ que la France peut se relever et vivre tant qu'on n'aura pas fait justice de ce pretendu suffrage universel qui est le contraire du suffrage universel.

"Les croyances out subi le sort de ce serpent de la fable--coupe, hache par morceaux, dont chaque troncon devenait un serpent.

"Les croyances se sont changees en monnaie--en billon de credulites.

"Et pour finir la liste bien incomplete des croyances et des credulites--vous _croyez_, vous, qu'on ne croit a rien!"

CHAPTER II.

UNDER THE DRACHENFELS.

1. Without ign.o.bly trusting the devices of artificial memory--far less slighting the pleasure and power of resolute and thoughtful memory--my younger readers will find it extremely useful to note any coincidences or links of number which may serve to secure in their minds what may be called Dates of Anchorage, round which others, less important, may swing at various cables' lengths.

Thus, it will be found primarily a most simple and convenient arrangement of the years since the birth of Christ, to divide them by fives of centuries,--that is to say, by the marked periods of the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and, now fast nearing us, twentieth centuries.

And this--at first seemingly formal and arithmetical--division, will be found, as we use it, very singularly emphasized by signs of most notable change in the knowledge, disciplines, and morals of the human race.

2. All dates, it must farther be remembered, falling within the fifth century, begin with the number 4 (401, 402, etc.); and all dates in the tenth century with the number 9 (901, 902, etc.); and all dates in the fifteenth century with the number 14 (1401, 1402, etc.)

In our immediate subject of study, we are concerned with the first of these marked centuries--the fifth--of which I will therefore ask you to observe two very interesting divisions.

All dates of years in that century, we said, must begin with the number 4.

If you halve it for the second figure, you get 42.

And if you double it for the second figure, you get 48.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate II.--THE BIBLE OF AMIENS. NORTHERN PORCH BEFORE RESTORATION.]

Add 1, for the third figure, to each of these numbers, and you get 421 and 481, which two dates you will please fasten well down, and let there be no drifting about of them in your heads.

For the first is the date of the birth of Venice herself, and her dukedom, (see 'St. Mark's Rest,' Part I., p. 30); and the second is the date of birth of the French Venice, and her kingdom; Clovis being in that year crowned in Amiens.

3. These are the great Birthdays--Birthdates--in the fifth century, of Nations. Its Deathdays we will count, at another time.

Since, not for dark Rialto's dukedom, nor for fair France's kingdom, only, are these two years to be remembered above all others in the wild fifth century; but because they are also the birth-years of a great Lady, and greater Lord, of all future Christendom--St.

Genevieve, and St. Benedict.

Genevieve, the 'white wave' (Laughing water)--the purest of all the maids that have been named from the sea-foam or the rivulet's ripple, unsullied,--not the troubled and troubling Aphrodite, but the Leucothea of Ulysses, the guiding wave of deliverance.

White wave on the blue--whether of pure lake or sunny sea--(thenceforth the colours of France, blue field with white lilies), she is always the type of purity, in active brightness of the entire soul and life--(so distinguished from the quieter and restricted innocence of St. Agnes),--and all the traditions of sorrow in the trial or failure of n.o.ble womanhood are connected with her name; Ginevra, in Italian, pa.s.sing into Shakespeare's Imogen; and Guinevere, the torrent wave of the British mountain streams, of whose pollution your modern sentimental minstrels chant and moan to you, lugubriously useless;--but none tell you, that I hear, of the victory and might of this white wave of France.

4. A shepherd maid she was--a tiny thing, barefooted, bare-headed--such as you may see running wild and innocent, less cared for now than their sheep, over many a hillside of France and Italy. Tiny enough;--seven years old, all told, when first one hears of her: "Seven times one are seven, (I am old, you may trust me, linnet, linnet[10])," and all around her--fierce as the Furies, and wild as the winds of heaven--the thunder of the Gothic armies, reverberate over the ruins of the world.

5. Two leagues from Paris, (_Roman_ Paris, soon to pa.s.s away with Rome herself,) the little thing keeps her flock, not even her own, nor her father's flock, like David; she is the hired servant of a richer farmer of Nanterre. Who can tell me anything about Nanterre?--which of our pilgrims of this omni-speculant, omni-nescient age has thought of visiting what shrine may be there? I don't know even on what side of Paris it lies,[11] nor under which heap of railway cinders and iron one is to conceive the sheep-walks and blossomed fields of fairy St.

Phyllis. There were such left, even in my time, between Paris and St.

Denis, (see the prettiest chapter in all the "Mysteries of Paris,"

where Fleur de Marie runs wild in them for the first time), but now, I suppose, St. Phyllis's native earth is all thrown up into bastion and glacis, (profitable and blessed of all saints, and her, as _these_ have since proved themselves!) or else are covered with manufactories and cabarets. Seven years old she was, then, when on his way to _England_ from Auxerre, St. Germain pa.s.sed a night in her village, and among the children who brought him on his way in the morning in more kindly manner than Elisha's convoy, noticed this one--wider-eyed in reverence than the rest; drew her to him, questioned her, and was sweetly answered: That she would fain be Christ's handmaid. And he hung round her neck a small copper coin, marked with the cross.

Thencefoward Genevieve held herself as "separated from the world."

[Footnote 10: Miss Ingelow.]

[Footnote 11: On inquiry, I find in the flat between Paris and Sevres.]

6. It did not turn out so, however. Far the contrary. You must think of her, instead, as the first of Parisiennes. Queen of Vanity Fair, that was to be, sedately poor St. Phyllis, with her copper-crossed farthing about her neck! More than Nitocris was to Egypt, more than Semiramis to Nineveh, more than Zen.o.bia to the city of palm trees--this seven-years-old shepherd maiden became to Paris and her France. You have not heard of her in that kind?--No: how should you?--for she did not lead armies, but stayed them, and all her power was in peace.

7. There are, however, some seven or eight and twenty lives of her, I believe; into the literature of which I cannot enter, nor need, all having been ineffective in producing any clear picture of her to the modern French or English mind; and leaving one's own poor sagacities and fancy to gather and shape the sanct.i.ty of her into an intelligible, I do not say a _credible_, form; for there is no question here about belief,--the creature is as real as Joan of Arc, and far more powerful;--she is separated, just as St. Martin is, by his patience, from too provocative prelates--by her quietness of force, from the pitiable crowd of feminine martyr saints.

There are thousands of religious girls who have never got themselves into any calendars, but have wasted and wearied away their lives--heaven knows why, for _we_ cannot; but here is one, at any rate, who neither scolds herself to martyrdom, nor frets herself into consumption, but becomes a tower of the Flock, and builder of folds for them all her days.

8. The first thing, then, you have to note of her, is that she is a pure native _Gaul_. She does not come as a missionary out of Hungary, or Illyria, or Egypt, or ineffable s.p.a.ce; but grows at Nanterre, like a marguerite in the dew, the first "Reine Blanche" of Gaul.

I have not used this ugly word 'Gaul' before, and we must be quite sure what it means, at once, though it will cost us a long parenthesis.

9. During all the years of the rising power of Rome, her people called everybody a Gaul who lived north of the sources of Tiber. If you are not content with that general statement, you may read the article "Gallia"

in Smith's dictionary, which consists of seventy-one columns of close print, containing each as much as three of my pages; and tells you at the end of it, that "though long, it is not complete." You may however, gather from it, after an attentive perusal, as much as I have above told you.

But, as early as the second century after Christ, and much more distinctly in the time with which we are ourselves concerned--the fifth--the wild nations opposed to Rome, and partially subdued, or held at bay by her, had resolved themselves into two distinct ma.s.ses, belonging to two distinct _lat.i.tudes_. One, _fixed_ in habitation of the pleasant temperate zone of Europe--England with her western mountains, the healthy limestone plateaux and granite mounts of France, the German labyrinths of woody hill and winding thal, from the Tyrol to the Hartz, and all the vast enclosed basin and branching valleys of the Carpathians. Think of these four districts, briefly and clearly, as 'Britain,' 'Gaul,' 'Germany,' and 'Dacia.'

10. North of these rudely but patiently _resident_ races, possessing fields and orchards, quiet herds, homes of a sort, moralities and memories not ign.o.ble, dwelt, or rather drifted, and shook, a shattered chain of gloomier tribes, piratical mainly, and predatory, nomad essentially; homeless, of necessity, finding no stay nor comfort in earth, or bitter sky: desperately wandering along the waste sands and drenched mora.s.ses of the flat country stretching from the mouths of the Rhine to those of the Vistula, and beyond Vistula n.o.body knows where, nor needs to know. Waste sands and rootless bogs their portion, ice-fastened and cloud-shadowed, for many a day of the rigorous year: shallow pools and oozings and windings of r.e.t.a.r.ded streams, black decay of neglected woods, scarcely habitable, never loveable; to this day the inner main-lands little changed for good[12]--and their inhabitants now fallen even on sadder times.

[Footnote 12: See generally any description that Carlyle has had occasion to give of Prussian or Polish ground, or edge of Baltic sh.o.r.e.]

11. For in the fifth century they had herds of cattle[13] to drive and kill, unpreserved hunting-grounds full of game and wild deer, tameable reindeer also then, even so far in the south; spirited hogs, good for practice of fight as in Meleager's time, and afterwards for bacon; furry creatures innumerable, all good for meat or skin. Fish of the infinite sea breaking their bark-fibre nets; fowl innumerable, migrant in the skies, for their flint-headed arrows; bred horses for their own riding; ships of no mean size, and of all sorts, flat-bottomed for the oozy puddles, keeled and decked for strong Elbe stream and furious Baltic on the one side, for mountain-cleaving Danube and the black lake of Colchos on the south.

[Footnote 13: Gigantic--and not yet fossilized! See Gibbon's note on the death of Theodebert: "The King pointed his spear--the Bull _overturned a tree on his head_,--he died the same day."--vii. 255.

The Horn of Uri and her shield, with the chiefly towering crests of the German helm, attest the terror of these Aurochs herds.]

12. And they were, to all outward aspect, and in all _felt_ force, the living powers of the world, in that long hour of its transfiguration.

All else known once for awful, had become formalism, folly, or shame:--the Roman armies, a mere sworded mechanism, fast falling confused, every sword against its fellow;--the Roman civil mult.i.tude, mixed of slaves, slave-masters, and harlots; the East, cut off from Europe by the intervening weakness of the Greek. These starving troops of the Black forests and White seas, themselves half wolf, half drift-wood, (as _we_ once called ourselves Lion-hearts, and Oak-hearts, so they), merciless as the herded hound, enduring as the wild birch-tree and pine. You will hear of few beside them for five centuries yet to come: Visigoths, west of Vistula;--Ostrogoths, east of Vistula; radiant round little Holy Island (Heligoland), our own Saxons, and Hamlet the Dane, and his foe the sledded Polack on the ice,--all these south of Baltic; and pouring _across_ Baltic, constantly, her mountain-ministered strength, Scandinavia, until at last _she_ for a time rules all, and the Norman name is of disputeless dominion, from the North Cape to Jerusalem.

13. _This_ is the apparent, this the only recognised world history, as I have said, for five centuries to come. And yet the real history is underneath all this. The wandering armies are, in the heart of them, only living hail, and thunder, and fire along the ground. But the Suffering Life, the rooted heart of native humanity, growing up in eternal gentleness, howsoever wasted, forgotten, or spoiled,--itself neither wasting, nor wandering, nor slaying, but unconquerable by grief or death, became the seed ground of all love, that was to be born in due time; giving, then, to mortality, what hope, joy, or genius it could receive; and--if there be immortality--rendering out of the grave to the Church her fostering Saints, and to Heaven her helpful Angels.

14. Of this low-nestling, speechless, harmless, infinitely submissive, infinitely serviceable order of being, no Historian ever takes the smallest notice, except when it is robbed or slain. I can give you no picture of it, bring to your ears no murmur of it, nor cry. I can only show you the absolute 'must have been' of its unrewarded past, and the way in which all we have thought of, or been told, is founded on the deeper facts in its history, unthought of, and untold.

15. The main ma.s.s of this innocent and invincible peasant life is, as I have above told you, grouped in the fruitful and temperate districts of (relatively) mountainous Europe,--reaching, west to east, from the Cornish Land's End to the mouth of the Danube. Already, in the times we are now dealing with, it was full of native pa.s.sion--generosity--and intelligence capable of all things. Dacia gave to Rome the four last of her great Emperors,[14]--Britain to Christianity the first deeds, and the final legends, of her chivalry,--Germany, to all manhood, the truth and the fire of the Frank,--Gaul, to all womanhood, the patience and strength of St. Genevieve.