gels, Jesus said: "Know ye who hath thus arrayed Me?
My servant Martin, though yet unbaptised, hath done this." After this
vision Martin received baptism and remained steadfast in the faith.
The illiterate and dauntless soldier became the fiery apostle of the
faith, a vigorous iconoclast, throwing down the images of the false
gods, breaking their altars in pieces and burning their temples. Of
the Roman gods, Mercury, he said, was most difficult to ban, but Jove
was merely stupid[12] and brutish, and gave him least trouble.

[Footnote 12: "_Jovem brutum atque hebetem._"]

On the 16th of March 1711, some workmen, digging a burial crypt for
the archbishops of Paris under the choir of Notre Dame, came upon a
wall, six feet below the pavement, which contemporary antiquarians
believed to be the wall of the original Christian basilica over which
the cathedral was built, but which modern authorities affirm to have
been part of the old Gallo-Roman wall of the Cite. In the fabric of
this wall the early builders had incorporated the remains of a temple
of Jupiter, and among the _debris_ were found the fragments of an
altar raised to Jove in the reign of Tiberius Caesar by the _Nautae_, a
guild of Parisian merchant-shippers, and the table of another altar on
whose foyer still remained some of the very burnt wood and incense
used in the last pagan sacrifice. The mutilated stones, with their
rude Gallo-Roman reliefs and inscriptions,[13] may be seen in the
Frigidarium of the Thermae, the old Roman baths by the Hotel de Cluny,
and are among the most interesting of historical documents in Paris.
The Corporation of _Nautae Parisiaci_, one of the most powerful of the
guilds, among whose members were enrolled the chief citizens of
Lutetia, who dedicated this altar to Jove, were the origin of the
Commune or Civil Council of Paris, whose Provost[14] was known as late
as the fourteenth century as the _Prevot des Marchands d'Eau_. Their
device was the _Nef_, or ship, which is and has been throughout the
ages, the arms of Paris, and which to this day may be seen carved on
the vaultings of the Roman baths.

[Footnote 13: On the former may still be read: TIB ... CAESARE AVG.
IOVI. OPTVM ... MAXSVMO. ARAM. NAVTAE. PARISIACI PVBLICE. POSIERVNT.]

[Footnote 14: Not to be confounded with the Royal Provost, a king's
officer, who in 1160 replaced the Capetian viscounts. The office was
abolished in 1792.]

In the great palace of which these baths