ng cut off a portion
of his dress. If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient,
mediaeval and modern, be of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute.
Dante, expressing the prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, "Now,
was there ever people so vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by
far."[2] Of their imperturbable gaiety and their avidity for new
things we have ample testimony, and the course of this story will
demonstrate that France, and more especially Paris, has ever been,
from the establishment of Christianity to the birth of the modern
world at the Revolution, the parent or the fosterer of ideas, the
creator of arts, the soldier of the ideal. She has always evinced a
wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. Sir Henry Maine
has shown in his _Ancient Law_ that the idea of kingship created by
the accession of the Capetian dynasty revolutionised the whole fabric
of society, and that "when the feudal prince of a limited territory
surrounding Paris began ... to call himself _King of France_, he
became king in quite a new sense." The earliest of the western people
beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery
near Tours, a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of
Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In
the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian
world. From the time of the centralisation of the monarchy at Paris
she absorbed in large measure the vital forces of the nation, and all
that was greatest in art, science and literature was drawn within her
walls, until in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became
the centre of learning, taste and culture in Europe.[3] "Alone of the
capitals of Modern Europe," said Freeman, "Paris can claim to have
been the creator of the state of which it is now the head." The same
authority bears witness to the unique position held by France in her
generous and liberal treatment of new subjects, and the late
historian, Mr. C.A. Fyffe, told the writer that when travelling in
Alsace in 1871 the inhabitants of that province, so essentially German
in race, were passionately attached to France, and more than once he
heard a peasant exclaim, unable even to express himself in French:
"_Nimmer will ich Deutsch sein._"

[Footnote 2: _Inf._ XXIX. 121-123. A French commentator consoles
himself by reflecting that the author of the _Divina Commedia_ is far
more vituperative when deali