Of the two sons of Pippin, between whom his kingdom was immediately divided, Paris fell to the lot of Karlmann. But he chose Soissons for his crowning-place--the place where his father had been crowned before him.[45] Charles, crowned at Noyon, made Aachen his capital, and, in the course of his whole reign, he visited Paris only on a single progress, when it is incidentally mentioned among a long string of other cities.[46] But this time of utter neglect was, in the history of Paris, only the darkness before the coming of the dawn. In the course of the next reign Paris begins to play an important part, and from that time the importance of the city steadily grew till it became what we have seen it in our own day. The occasional visits of Lewis the Pious to the city are dwelled on by his poetical biographer with evident delight, and with even more than usual pomp of words.[47]. And the city was now about to appear in its most characteristic; light. In the words of Sir Francis Palgrave, who has sketched the early history of Paris with great power and insight,[48] 'the City of Revolutions begins her real history by the first French Revolution.'[49] In this particular case we do not even grudge the premature use of the word 'French,' for the movement of which he speaks was plainly a movement of the Romanized lands of the West against their Teutonic master. Most likely no such feeling was consciously present to the mind of any man; but nations and parties seek to shape themselves unconsciously, and cities and regions learn to play their appropriate parts, before they can give any intelligible account of what they are doing. The Emperor was leading an expedition against the revolted Bretons; suddenly all the disaffected spirits of the Empire, his own sons among the foremost, gathered themselves together at Paris.[50] They then seized Lewis himself at Compiègne, and their hated step-mother Judith on the rock of Laon. But one part of his dominions was still faithful to the imprisoned Cæsar; the German lands had no share in the rebellion, and eagerly sought for the restoration of their sovereign. In marking out the geographical divisions of feeling, the writer of the ninth century, like those of the nineteenth, is driven, as it were, to forestal the language of a somewhat later time. The Emperor had no confidence in the French, but he put his trust in the German.[51]