e of her glorious past; while Rome was
becoming all-powerful. Legend tells that adventurous Phoenicians and
Greeks discovered the French coasts, that Nimes was founded by a Tyrian
Hercules, and Marseilles, about 600 B.C., by a Phoenician trader who
married a chief's daughter and settled at the mouth of the Rhone. But
these early settlements were merely isolated towns, which were not
interdependent;--scarcely more than trading posts. It was Rome who took
southern Gaul unto herself, and after Roman fashion, built cities and
towns and co-ordinated them into well-regulated provinces; and it is
with Roman rule that the connected history of Gaul begins.

From the outset we meet one basic fact, so difficult to realise when
France is considered as one country, the essential difference between
the North and the South. Caesar found in the South a partial Roman
civilisation ready for his organisation; and old, flourishing cities,
like Narbonne, Aix, and Marseilles. In the North he found the people
advanced no further than the tribal stage, and Paris--not even Paris in
name--was a collection of mud huts, which, from its strategic position,
he elevated into a camp. The two following centuries, the height of
Roman dominion in France, accentuated these differences. The North was
governed by the Romans, never assimilated nor civilised by them. The
South eagerly absorbed all the culture of the Imperial City; her
religions and her pleasures, her beautiful Temples and great
Amphitheatres, finally her morals and effeminacy, till in the II century
of our era, anyone living a life of luxurious gaiety was popularly said
to have "set sail for Marseilles." To this day the South boasts that it
was a very part of Rome, and Rome was not slow to recognise the claim.
Gallic poets celebrated the glory of Augustus, a Gaul was the master
of Quintilian, and Antoninus Pius, although born in the Imperial City,
was by parentage a native of Nimes.

[Illustration: "CARCASSONNE, THE INVULNERABLE."]

Not to the rude North, but to this society, so pagan, so
pleasure-loving, came the first missionaries of the new Christian faith,
to meet in the arenas of Gaul the fate of their fellow-believers in
Rome, to hide in subterranean caves and crypts, to endure, to persist,
and finally to conquer. In the III and IV centuries many of the great
Bishoprics were founded, Avignon, Narbonne, Lyons, Arles, and
Saint-Paul-trois Chateaux among others; but these same years brou