specially remembered on account of the frightful havoc wrought among the churches of the city. The church of Saint Genoveva, on the left bank of the river--better known to modern ears as the Pantheon--was burned, Saint Stephen's, afterwards known as Nôtre Dame, Saint Germans, and Saint Denis, bought their deliverance only by large ransoms.[59] In the minds of the preachers of the time the woes of Paris suggested the woes of Jerusalem and a wail of sorrow went up from the Jeremiah of the age for the havoc of the city and its holy places.[60] When we remember the importance to which Paris was plainly beginning to rise under Lewis the Pious, we may perhaps be led to think that it was the constant attacks to which the city was exposed which hindered it from becoming the permanent dwelling-place of royalty under Charles the Bald. That the city held a place in his affections throughout his life is shown by his choosing Saint Denis as the place of his burial. But it never became the royal city of the Kings of his house. We need hardly look on it as a mark of personal cowardice in Charles that he preferred to fix the ordinary seat of his government in some other place than the most exposed fortress of his kingdom. Compiègne now often appears as a royal dwelling-place; but the home and centre of Carolingian royalty in the Western Kingdom gradually fixed itself on a spot the most opposite to Paris in position and feeling which the Western Kingdom could afford. Paris and Laon were in every sense rivals; their rivalry is stamped upon their very outward appearance. Each is a representative city. Paris, like Châlons and Bristol, is essentially an island city; the river was its defence against ordinary enemies, however easily that defence might be changed into a highway for its attack in the hands of the amphibious Northmen. But Laon is the very pride of that class of towns which out of Gaulish hill-forts grew into Roman and mediæval cities. None stands more proudly on its height; none has kept its ancient character so little changed to our own day. The town still keeps itself within the walls which fence in the hill-top, and whatever there is of suburb has grown up at the foot, apart from the ancient city. Paris again was the home of the new-born nationality of the Romance speech,[61] the home of the new French nation. Laon stood near the actual German border, in a land where German was still spoken; it was fitted in every way to be, as it proved, the last home of a German dynasty in the West. There can be little doubt that, by thus moving eastward, by placing themselves in this outlying Teutonic corner of their realm, the Carolingian Kings of the West threw away the opportunity of putting themselves at the head of the new national movement, and of reigning as national Kings, if not of the whole Romance-speaking population of Gaul, at least of its strictly French portion north of the Loire.