(Brunhilde or Brunhaut), naked, and tied by one arm, one leg, and her
hair to the tail of an unbroken horse, and amid jeers and shouts dashed
over the stones of Paris (A.D. 600).

Upon the death of Clovis his inheritance was divided among four sons,
who, with their wives and families and their tempestuous passions,
afforded material for a great epic. Whether Fredegunde or Brunhilde
was the more terrible who can say? But the story of these rival
queens, with their loves and their hatreds and their ambitious,
vengeful fury, is more like the story of demons than of women. But
these conditions led to two results which played a great part in
subsequent events. One was the exclusion of women from the succession
by the adoption of the Salic Law. Then, in order to curb the
degeneracy or to reinforce the inefficiency of the hereditary ruler,
there was created the office of _Maire du Palais_, a modest title which
contained the germ of the future, not alone of France, but of the world.

To imperfect human vision it would have seemed at the time a fatal
mistake to bury out of sight the refinements which a Latin civilization
had been for nearly five centuries planting in Gaul. But so often has
this been repeated in the history of the world, one is compelled to
recognize it as a part of the evolutionary method. Again and again
have we seen old civilizations effaced by barbarians. But these
barbarians with their coarseness and brutality have usually brought
something better than refinement; a spirit so transforming, so
vitalizing, that we are compelled to believe it was the end sought in
the catastrophe we deplore: that is, a spirit of liberty, a sense of
personal independence, without which the refinements of art, even
reinforced by genius, are unavailing. Such was undoubtedly the
invigorating leaven brought into Gaul by the Frank, although for a time