ity, and took up his
position on the slopes of the hill of Lutetius (St. Genevieve) in the
south, and aimed at crushing his enemy between his own forces and an
army advancing from the north. Labienus having learnt that Caesar was
in a tight place, owing to a check at Clermont and the defection of
the Eduans, by a masterly piece of engineering recrossed the Seine by
night at the Point du Jour, where the double viaduct of the girdle
railway crosses to-day, and when the Gauls awoke in the morning they
beheld the bannered host of the Roman legions in battle array on the
plain of Grenelle beneath. They made a desperate attempt to drive them
against the river, but they lost their leader and were almost
annihilated by the superior arms and strategy of the Romans. Labienus
was able to join his master at Sens, and the irrevocable subjugation
of the Gauls soon followed. With the tolerant and enlightened
conquerors came the Roman peace, Roman law, Roman roads, the Roman
schoolmaster; and a more humane religion abolished the Druidical
sacrifices. Lutetia was rebuilt and became a prosperous and, next to
Lyons, the most important of Gallo-Roman cities. It lay equidistant
from Germany and Britain and at the issue of valleys which led to the
upper and lower Rhine. The quarries of Mount Lutetius produced an
admirable building stone, kind to work and hardening well under
exposure to the air, whose white colour may have won for Paris the
name of Leucotia, or the White City, by which it is sometimes known to
ancient writers. Caesar had done his work well, for so completely were
the Gauls Romanised, that by the fifth or sixth century their very
language had disappeared.[7]

[Footnote 6: "_Cesare armato con gli occhi grifani._"--_Inferno_, iv.
123.]

[Footnote 7: Of some 10,000 ancient inscriptions found in Gaul, only
twenty are in Celtic, and less than thirty words of Celtic origin now
remain in the French language.]

But towards the end of the third century three lowly wayfarers were
journeying from Rome along the great southern road to Paris, charged
by the Pope with a mission fraught with greater issues to Gaul than
were the Caesars and all their legions. Let us recall somewhat of the
appearance of the city which Dionysius, Rusticus and Eleutherius saw
as they neared its suburbs and came down what is now known as the Rue
St. Jacques. After passing the arches of the aqueduct, two of which
exist to this day, that crossed the valley of