e only, dragged from the cloister
as ghosts from the tomb to play a motionless part in the drama. For a
long time past the real power had been in the hands of that valiant
Austrasian family which was to furnish the dominions of Clovis with a
new dynasty and a greater king than Clovis.

Southern Gaul, that is to say, Aquitania, Vasconia, Narbonness, called
Septimania, and the two banks of the Rhone near its mouths, were not
comprised in these partitions of the Frankish dominions. Each of the
copartitioners assigned to themselves, to the south of the Garonne and on
the coasts of the Mediterranean, in that beautiful region of old Roman
Gaul, such and such a district or such and such a town, just as heirs-at-
law keep to themselves severally such and such a piece of furniture or
such and such a valuable jewel out of a rich property to which they
succeed, and which they divide amongst them. The peculiar situation of
those provinces at their distance from the Franks' own settlements
contributed much towards the independence which Southern Gaul, and
especially Aquitania, was constantly striving and partly managed to
recover, amidst the extension and tempestuous fortunes of the Frankish
monarchy. It is easy to comprehend how these repeated partitions of a
mighty inheritance with so many successors, these dominions continually
changing both their limits and their masters, must have tended to
increase the already profound anarchy of Roman and Barbaric worlds thrown
pell-mell one upon the other, and fallen a prey, the Roman to the
disorganization of a lingering death, the barbaric to the fermentation of
a new existence striving for development under social conditions quite
different from those of its primitive life. Some historians have said
that, in spite of these perpetual dismemberments of the great Frankish
dominion, a real unity had always existed in the Frankish monarchy, and
regulated the destinies of its constituent peoples. They who say so show
themselves singularly easy to please in the matter of political unity and
international harmony. Amongst those various States, springing from a
common base and subdivided between the different members of one and the
same family, rivalries, enmities, hostile machinations, deeds of violence
and atrocity, struggles and wars soon became as frequent, as bloody, and
as obstinate as they have ever been amongst states and sovereigns as
unconnected as possible one with another. It wi