. At length he turned and said: "Know ye my faithful servants,
wherefore I weep thus bitterly? I fear not these wretched pirates, but
I am afflicted that they should dare to approach these shores, and
sorely do grieve when I foresee what evil they will work on my sons
and on my people." His courtiers deemed they were Breton or Saracen
pirates, but the emperor knew better. They were the terrible Northmen,
soon to prove a bloodier scourge to Gaul than Hun or Goth or Saracen;
and to meet them Charlemagne left an empire distracted by civil war,
and a nerveless, feeble prince, Louis the Pious, Louis the Forgiving,
fitter for the hermit's cell than for the throne and sword of an
emperor.

In 841 the black boats of the sea-rovers for the first time entered
the Seine, and burnt Rouen and Fontenelle. In 845 a fleet of one
hundred and twenty vessels swept up its higher waters and on Easter
Eve captured, plundered and burnt Paris, sacked its monasteries and
churches and butchered their monks and priests. The futile Emperor
Charles the Bald bought them off at St. Denis with seven thousand
livres of silver, and they went back to their Scandinavian homes
gorged with plunder--only to return year by year, increased in numbers
and ferocity. Words cannot picture the terror of the citizens and
monks when the dread squadrons, with the monstrous dragons carved on
their prows, their great sails and threefold serried ranks of
men-of-prey, were sighted. Everyone left his home and sought refuge in
flight; the monks hurried off with the bodies of the saints, the
relics and treasures of the sanctuary, to hide them in far-away
cities. In 852 Charles' soldiers refused to fight, and for two hundred
and eighty-seven days the pirates ravaged the valley of the Seine at
their will. Never within memory or tradition were such things known.
Rouen, Bayeux, Beauvais, Paris, Meaux, Melun, Chartres, Evreux, were
devastated; the islands of the Seine were whitened by the bones of the
victims, and similar horrors were wrought along the other rivers of
France. In 858 a body of the freebooters settled on the island of
Oissel, below Rouen, and issued forth _en excursion_ to spoil and slay
and burn at their pleasure: the once rich city of Paris was left a
cinder heap; the abbey of St. Genevieve was sacked and burnt, Notre
Dame, St. Stephen, St. Germain des Pres and St Denis alone escaping at
the cost of immense bribes. Charles ordered two fortresses to be built
for