f speaking, as
under Charlemagne, of the school of the palace, people called the palace
of Charles the Bald the palace of the school. Amongst the eleven kings
who after him ascended the Carlovingian throne, several, such as Louis
III. and Carloman, and, especially, Louis the Ultramarine (d'Outremer)
and Lothaire, displayed, on several occasions, energy and courage; and
the kings elected, at this epoch, without the pale of the Carlovingian
dynasty--Eudes in 887 and Raoul in 923--gave proofs of a valor both
discreet and effectual. The Carlovingians did not, as the Merovingians
did, end in monkish retirement or shameful inactivity even the last of
them, and the only one termed sluggard, Louis V., was getting ready, when
he died, for an expedition in Spain against the Saracens. The truth is
that, mediocre or undecided or addle-pated as they may have been, they
all succumbed, internally and externally, without initiating and without
resisting, to the course of events, and that, in 987, the fall of the
Carlovingian line was the natural and easily accomplished consequence of
the new social condition which had been preparing in France under the
empire.

CHAPTER XIII.----FEUDAL FRANCE AND HUGH CAPET.

The reader has just seen that, twenty-nine years after the death of
Charlemagne, that is, in 843, when, by the treaty of Verdun, the sons of
Louis the Debonnair had divided amongst them his dominions, the great
empire split up into three distinct and independent kingdoms--the
kingdoms of Italy, Germany, and France. The split did not stop there.
Forty-five years later, at the end of the ninth century, shortly after
the death of Charles the Fat, the last of the Carlovingians who appears
to have re-united for a while all the empire of Charlemagne, this empire
had begotten seven instead of three kingdoms, those of France, of
Navarre, of Provence or Cisjuran Burgundy, of Trans-juran Burgundy, or
Lorraine, of Allemannia, and of Italy. This is what had become of the
factitious and ephemeral unity of that Empire of the West which
Charlemagne had wished to put in the place of the Roman empire.

We will leave where they are the three distinct and independent kingdoms,
and turn our introspective gaze upon the kingdom of France. There we
recognize the same fact; there the same work of dismemberment is going
on. About the end of the ninth century there were already twenty-nine
provinces or fragments of provinces which had become