place to be numbered, there was no difficulty in obtaining this accommodation.

The inns were, in general, dirty and miserable, even at the large towns, and very different in their aspect from those at which coaches generally stop to dine in England, where travelling is brought to so much greater perfection than in France. The conductor had nothing either of the bluster or the servility which is frequently characteristic of our stage-coachmen. There was something of the sober importance of office about him: he was always very civil; and invariably took his meals at the same table with the company.

Our line of road was the locality of some of the last scenes in that great European drama which issued in the overthrow of the military sovereignty of Bonaparte. A large army of the Allies crossed the Rhine, at Basle, in December 1813; and by the middle of January 1814, part of them had occupied Langres; while a detachment of the forces of Bonaparte was at Chaumont, a distance of not more, than twenty-five miles. The Allied Sovereigns themselves had fixed their head-quarters at Chatillon, about forty miles west of Langres, where they held a Congress, which was attended by Lord Castlereagh, as the representative of Great Britain.

Napoleon had appointed the Empress Maria Louisa regent, and had left Paris to encounter the potentates and powers whose thrones he had before frequently made to tremble, but who were now assembled together to fight the battle of Europe, on the plains of France itself. The great conqueror was defeated in person, at La Rotherie, by the combined forces of Russia and Austria, under the command of Blucher, his deadly enemy. He then retreated to Troyes, and subsequently to Nogent sur Seine. The Allies entered Troyes on the 7th of February, and Prince Schwartzenburg there established his head-quarters.

These operations were witnessed by the French people with perfect apathy; for as the combined armies neither laid waste their country, nor dictated to them their future course as to a sovereign, they were content to regard the quarrel in its true light, as an affair between the Allies and Bonaparte. He was still treated with, by the Congress, as Emperor of France, through his representative Caulincourt, although advantages had been gained in various quarters over his troops. Indeed it did not, even now, appear too late for him to make terms with the Allies, especially in consequence of his connection with the house of Austria, on which he was thought to calculate much.

The Congress, however, were soon convinced, from his vacillating behaviour, that no peace which was to be depended on, could be made with him; and on the 18th of March, the

negotiations at Chatillon were finally broken off. In the meantime, the storm was gathering all round, that was shortly to burst in fury on the head of this great military chief, who had so long agitated Europe. Lord Wellington was advancing from the Pyrenees; Bourdeaux, the fourth city in France, declared for the Bourbons, and deputies were sent from it to Louis XVIII.; while the allied armies of the east were bearing, from various points, on Paris, to the number of 200,000 men. At length, they entered the French capital, with the acclamations of the people; and on the 2d of April, the senate solemnly deposed Napoleon, and absolved all his subjects from their allegiance to him. A liberal constitution was now drawn up by the provisional government, for the acceptance of the French nation, and of Louis XVIII.

Bonaparte now offered to abdicate in favor of his son; but as this proposal was not made till after he had been deposed by the sentence of the provisional government, it was not entertained. He now chose formally to renounce the thrones of France and Italy, stating that as the allied powers had proclaimed him to be the only obstacle to the peace of Europe, he wished to show that there was 'no sacrifice, not even that of life,' to which he would not readily submit for the welfare of France! But this display of generosity did but make a merit of necessity, and came too late to touch the hearts of the French people, many of whom violently insulted the former idol of their vanity, as he was passing through the south of France to proceed to Elba. The sovereignty of this small island, with a revenue of two millions of francs,* was now assigned to him who had aspired to a wider empire than that of Charlemagne.

It appears to have been more astonishing to many, at the time, than it will appear to posterity, that Bonaparte should find the means of returning from Elba, once more to give law to France from the palace of the Capetians;-but the star of his destinies had waned, and this momentary gleam only betokened the immediate extinction of its glory, for he was now but the monarch of a 'hundred days;' and the names of Waterloo and St. Helena, will be vocal to every future age, in bearing witness, in the most impressive tones, to the madness of ambition, and the vanity of human greatness.

OUTLINE OF FRENCH HISTORY.

269

LETTER XX.

Sketch of French History. Feudal Divisions. Franks. The Merovingian Dynasty. Clovis. Maires du Palais, and Rois Fainéans. Carlovingian Dynasty. Pépin. Charlemagne. Charles the Bald. Charles le Gros. Capetian Dynasty. Hugh Capet. Feudal System. Philip II. Louis IX. or St. Louis. Philip III. Philip IV. Valois Branch of the House of Capet. Charles IV. Philip VI. Wars with England. Charles VI. Charles VII. Joan d'Arc. Louis XI. Charles VIII. Orleans Branch of Capet. Louis XII. Second House of Valois Capet. Francis I. Francis II. Religious Wars. Persecution of Protestants. Charles IX. Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. Bourbon Line. Henry IV. Louis XIII. Richelieu. Louis XIV. Mazarin. Louis XV. Louis XVI.

FRANCE, like other kingdoms that have been formed from the union of a number of separate sovereignties, has little real unity in its history for many centuries. The feudal divisions which broke into fragments the territory that lies between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, the Alps, and the Ocean, frequently render it difficult to find a common centre in which the events that were spread over this wide extent of country may be regarded as converging; and the different Duchés and Comtés, though more or less attached by feudal ties to a nominally superior power, were in strictness so many distinct states, each capable of a history of its own, till the reconstruction of the political edifice was gradually accomplished by means of the successful despotism, and the military splendor of several of the Capetian Kings.

The French historians inform us that, in the year 420, the FRANKS, a people who styled themselves by this name to show their love of liberty and their boast of independence, having shaken off the ROMAN yoke, made an irruption from the banks of the Main, the Rhine, and the Weser, into Gaul, under Pharamond, who had been proclaimed their monarch by being carried aloft on a buckler around the camp. This invasion did not succeed; as the Gauls, assisted by the Romans to whom they were tributaries, were too strong for the Franks. The latter, however, finally subdued the Gauls, in 451, after having defeated Attila, king of the Huns, at the battle of Chalons. Mérovée is said to have subsequently established the seat of his new kingdom on the site now occupied by Paris.

Whatever doubts may attach to the history of Pharamond, and to the identity of that Meroveus who is supposed to have given his name to the first race of the Frankish kings,-from the time of Clovis the Great, the annals of few countries are

better authenticated than those of France. Clovis appears, in 481, as the monarch of the Salian Franks, a people inhabiting a district of Belgic Gaul, between the Scheldt and the Rhine. Clovis gradually made himself master of the greater part of the whole country, and by defeating the Roman general Syagrius, at Soissons, in 486, he put an end to the imperial dominion, which had endeavored to sustain itself in those bloody wars that took place between the Franks and the Romans, under the government of five or six of the emperors.

Clovis also subdued the inhabitants of Armorica, or Bretagne; the Alemanni of the Rhine; and the Visigoths, who had settled in Aquitania, the country between the Pyrenees and the Garonne. His life was stained by cruelty and treachery; and he contrived to get rid of the greater part of the princes of his family, by causing some to be massacred, and by immolating others with his own hands. This monarch, who was born a Pagan, adopted Christianity, in fulfilment of a vow which he had made to worship the God of Clotilda, his Christian wife, if victory were granted him, over the Alemanni: and at his baptism by St. Remi at Rheims, with three thousand of his soldiers, in 496, he was anointed with the miraculous oil, said to have been sent down from heaven by means of a dove.* •

The four sons of Clovis divided Gaul into the kingdom of Austrasia, in the east; and in the west, into the kingdoms of Paris, Orleans, and Soissons,—divisions of Neustria. Childebert, who obtained that of Paris, is considered as the successor of his father. New conquests were now added to the Frankish dominion; but civil war, family feuds, and assassinations, the invasions of the Saracens from Spain, and the feebleness of the sovereigns, desolated the empire; and the semblance of unity was only kept up by the governors of the royal palace, officers who were subsequently termed Maires du Palais, and who, after reigning over kings, and holding their pretensions to the crown in abeyance at their pleasure, at length finally dispossessed the Merovingian dynasty of the government.

These majores domûs, or officers of the household, first became the prime ministers of the sovereign; and Clotaire II. is believed to have rendered their office permanent for life, and to have thus laid the foundation for the ruin of his House. The Mayors became at length independent of the crown in the

*The ampulla, or vessel for holding the oil for anointing the French kings at their coronation, was kept at Rheims. It was stolen during the revolution of 1789; and a soldier, in contempt of the 'miraculous and inexhaustible oil,' is said to have used it for his boots, or shoes. By those who were supposed to know best, the oil was pronounced to be not wholly lost; and some drops of it were professedly used in anointing Charles X. at his coronation, in 1825!

kingdoms of Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy; and thus the division of the Frankish monarchy was prolonged, till Pépin d'Héristel rendered the mayoral power hereditary in his family, and, during four reigns, governed the kings and their subjects, as a monarch, though without a crown. His son Charles Martel, and his grandson Pépin, continued to rule in the same manner, during the lives of the next four princes, under the cautious title of Duke of France.' The last eight kings of the MEROVINGIAN line are termed by the French historians Les Rois Fainéans, or the sluggard Kings, in consequence of their thus leaving everything, for twenty years, to the government of the mayors or dukes.

On the death of Childéric III., Pépin, surnamed Le Bref, from the shortness of his stature, son of Charles Martel, at length added the title of king to the regal authority which the mayors already possessed, and, in 751, founded the CARLOVINGIAN dynasty, which derived its name from Pépin's son and successor, Charles I., generally called Charlemagne, or Charles the Great. Under this prince, the Frankish empire attained its meridian glory; appearing like a blaze of light in the midst of the two long periods of darkness and barbarism that preceded and followed it. It cast the first and the last shadow of organised power on the disjointed wrecks of the western Roman empire; and stood forth in the interval between the breaking up of the turbulent democracies of the northern nations, and the dominion of the feudal system.

The empire of Charlemagne extended from the Ebro to the Elbe and the Danube; and from the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, to the Northern Sea; comprising France; Germany; part of Spain, of Hungary, and of Bohemia; some provinces of Dalmatia; and Italy as far as the river Garigliano in Naples. This great monarch's fame was known in Africa, and Asia; and the caliphs of Bagdad and the sovereigns of the Eastern Empire, treated him with respect, and sought his friendship. But his vast monarchy fell to pieces in the hands of his son, Louis le Débonnaire, among whose sons it was subsequently divided; and by the treaty of Verdun, in 843, the crowns of France, Germany, and Italy, were formally separated from each other: Charles the Bald, the youngest son of Louis, became the first monarch of the new kingdom of France.

Under Charles the Bald, the monarchical authority began to decline. The Dukes and Counts now became more powerful. The ravages of the Normans furnished the feudal barons with a pretext for erecting strong castles, which became the strongholds of oppression; the fiefs were rendered hereditary; and the royal power was reduced to a mere feudal supremacy. In Charles le Gros, the separated crowns of France,