But if the symbolism of gloves and their old, romantic usages largely have fallen away, leaving us an article of familiar, practical, everyday concern, the language of gloves for us is not dead. When we take pains to be fittingly costumed for an important occasion, there is no detail of our dress which we are more anxious should be in perfect keeping, than our gloves. To them still clings a halo of sentiment, part and parcel of our own dignity. In view of their history we are justified in our feeling. “Gloves,” says Beck, “outweigh all other articles of apparel which have been the outward and visible signs of hidden things.” CHAPTER IV. HOW GLOVES CAME TO GRENOBLE “A French town ... in which the product of successive ages, not without lively touches of the present, are blended together harmoniously, with a beauty _specific_—a beauty cisalpine and northern—and of which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being of the essence of its physiognomy.”—_Deny L’ Auxerrois_: _Walter Pater._ Many centuries ago, certain chieftains of the Allobroges were inspired to plant their little village of Cularo at the supremely strategic point of all southern Gaul. They built it a trifle to the East of the meeting place of two rivers, the Isère and the torrent of the Drac; north of them stretched the high, unbroken wall of the lower Alps. And there in the sheltered valley they lived and were protected against incursions of other more warlike tribes—until the great conqueror of the world poured its invincible legions over the mountain barriers, and Rome seized the little Allobrogian defence town to be a colonial outpost of considerable military importance. On the site of Cularo sprang up the strongly fortified Gratianopolis, thus called in honor of the Emperor Gratian who reinforced the walls begun by Diocletian and Maximian. Later, with the decline of the Roman power and the development of the Frankish nation, the Latin name was abbreviated to Grenoble—by which the modern city is known to-day as the chef-lieu of the department of the Isère in France.