Here their first capital, here the first footsteps[3] of the Frank in his France! Think of it. All over the south are Gauls, Burgundians, Bretons, heavier-hearted nations of sullen mind: at their outmost brim and border, here at last are the Franks, the source of all Franchise, for this our Europe. You have heard the word in England, before now, but English word for it is none! _Honesty_ we have of our own; but _Frankness_ we must learn of these: nay, all the western nations of us are in a few centuries more to be known by this name of Frank. Franks, of Paris that is to be, in time to come; but French of Paris is in year of grace 500 an unknown tongue in Paris, as much as in Stratford-att-ye-Bowe. French of Amiens is the kingly and courtly form of Christian speech, Paris lying yet in Lutetian clay, to develope into tile-field, perhaps, in due time. Here, by soft-glittering Somme, reign Clovis and his Clotilde. [Footnote 3: The first fixed and set-down footsteps; wandering tribes called Franks, had overswept the country, and recoiled, again and again. But _this_ invasion of the so-called Salian Franks, never retreats again.] And by St. Firmin's grave speaks now another gentle evangelist, and the first Frank king's prayer to the King of kings is made to Him, known only as "the God of Clotilde." I must ask the reader's patience now with a date or two, and stern facts--two--three--or more. Clodion, the leader of the first Franks who reach irrevocably beyond the Rhine, fights his way through desultory Roman cohorts as far as Amiens, and takes it, in 445.[4] [Footnote 4: See note at end of chapter, as also for the allusions in p. 8, to the battle of Soissons.] Two years afterwards, at his death, the scarcely asserted throne is seized--perhaps inevitably--by the tutor of his children, Merovee, whose dynasty is founded on the defeat of Attila at Chalons. He died in 457. His son Childeric, giving himself up to the love of women, and scorned by the Frank soldiery, is driven into exile, the Franks choosing rather to live under the law of Rome than under a base chief of their own. He receives asylum at the court of the king of Thuringia, and abides there. His chief officer in Amiens, at his departure, breaks a ring in two, and, giving him the half of it, tells him, when the other half is sent, to return. And, after many days, the half of the broken ring is sent, and he returns, and is accepted king by his Franks. The Thuringian queen follows him, (I cannot find if her husband is first dead--still less, if dead, how dying,) and offers herself to him for his wife. "I have known thy usefulness, and that thou art very strong; and I have come to live with thee. Had I known, in parts beyond sea, any one more useful than thou, I should have sought to live with _him_." He took her for his wife, and their son is Clovis.