ival
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
he succumbed to the enervating Gallic influence, and, while conquering
and subduing, was himself conquered and subdued.

The cultivated Roman in his toga appealed to the imagination of the
fine barbarian; the habits of the Romanized cities were a tempting
model for imitation. Bridges, aqueducts, palaces, with their splendid
mingling of strength and beauty, fragments of which still linger to
convince us of our inferiority, these were awe-inspiring to the Frank
and filled him with longings to drink deep at this fountain of
civilization. The heroic strain brought by Clovis was quickly
enfeebled and debauched by luxury. The court of the Merovingian king
became a miserable assemblage of half-Romanized barbarians covered with
the frayed and worn-out mantle of imperialism. It is a strange picture
we have of this descendant of Clovis, this _Roi Faineant_ (Do-nothing
King) in a royal procession on a state occasion. Curled and perfumed,
he emerges from the _Palais des Thermes_, attended in great pomp by
Romans and Rom