Introduction to Volumes III and IV

France and the Netherlands



The tourist bound for France lands either at Cherbourg, Havre, or
Boulogne. At Cherbourg, he sees waters in which the "Kearsarge" sank the
"Alabama"; at Havre a shelter in which, long before Caesar came to Gaul,
ships, with home ports on the Seine, sought safety from the sea; and at
Boulogne may recall the invading expedition to England, planned by
Napoleon, but which never sailed.

From the Roman occupation, many Roman remains have survived in England,
but these are far inferior in numbers and in state of preservation to the
Roman remains found in France. Marseilles was not only an important Roman
seaport, but its earliest foundations date perhaps from Phoenician times,
and certainly do from the age when Greeks were building temples at Paestum
and Girgenti. Rome got her first foothold in Marseilles as a consequence
of the Punic wars; and in 125 B.C. acquired a province (Provincia Romana)
reaching from the Alps to the Rhone, and southward to the sea, with Aix as
its first capital and Arles its second. Caesar in 58 B.C. found on the
Seine a tribe of men called Parisii, whose chief village, Lutetia, stood
where now rises Notre Dame.

Lutetia afterward became a residence of Roman emperors. Constantius