e
own eyes my son seated on my throne!'" And Louis set out again
immediately for Aquitaine.

He was never to see his father again. Charlemagne, after his son's
departure, went out hunting, according to his custom, in the forest of
Ardenne, and continued during the whole autumn his usual mode of life.
"But in January, 814, he was taken ill," says Eginhard, "of a violent
fever, which kept him to his bed. Recurring forthwith to the remedy he
ordinarily employed against fever, he abstained from all nourishment,
persuaded that this diet would suffice to drive away or at the least
assuage the malady; but added to the fever came that pain in the side
which the Greeks call _pleurisy_; nevertheless the Emperor persisted in
his abstinence, supporting his body only by drinks taken at long
intervals; and on the seventh day after that he had taken to his bed,
having received the holy communion," he expired about 9 A.M., on
Saturday, the 28th of January, 814, in his seventy-first year.

"After performance of ablutions and funeral duties, the corpse was
carried away and buried, amid the profound mourning of all the people,
in the church he had himself had built; and above his tomb there was put
up a gilded arcade with his image and this superscription: 'In this tomb
reposeth the body of Charles, great and orthodox Emperor, who did
gloriously extend the kingdom of the Franks, and did govern it happily
for forty-seven years. He died at the age of seventy years, in the year
of the Lord 814, in the seventh year of the Indiction, on the 5th of the
Kalends of February.'"

If we sum up his designs and his achievements, we find an admirably
sound idea and a vain dream, a great success and a great failure.

Charlemagne took in hand the work of placing upon a solid foundation the
Frankish Christian dominion by stopping, in the North and South, the
flood of barbarians and Arabs, paganism and Islamism. In that he
succeeded; the inundations of Asiatic populations spent their force in
vain against the Gallic frontier. Western and Christian Europe was
placed, territorially, beyond reach of attacks from the foreigner and
infidel. No sovereign, no human being, perhaps, ever rendered greater
service to the civilization of the world.

Charlemagne formed another conception and made another attempt. Like
more than one great barbaric warrior, he admired the Roman Empire that
had fallen, its vastness all in one, and its powerful organization under
the