Hugh had obtained a part of Burgundy on the return of Louis d’Outre-Mer; he now made use of the accession of Louis’ son Lothair, to have Aquitaine given him. But this time again, the royal sanction was powerless. William, duke of Aquitaine, received the invader in arms, and the war lasted for two years, when the duke of France died. He had named two kings and permitted a third to reign. Hugh Capet, his eldest son, inherited the duchy of France, and at the same time his father’s great influence, which he used in more moderate fashion. He never came into hostility with Lothair throughout the latter’s whole reign. He looked on quietly while the king was active in the east, west, and north, trying to get his hands on Normandy, seizing some territory from the count of Flanders, which he had to give back, and making military excursions into Lorraine as far as the borders of Germany. This fruitless activity, this restless desire to attempt hopeless conquests, was in singular contrast with Hugh Capet’s power of repose. One would have said that the latter divined the future and that he disdained to forestall fortune by a single step in the belief of what would come to him. In all this empty reign there is but one event that offers anything of interest. During an expedition in Lorraine (978), the principal object of his covetousness, Lothair came unexpectedly upon Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), where Otto II was then staying. The emperor was about to sit down to table when the arrival of the king of France forced him to flee, and Lothair ate the dinner prepared for Otto. Otto swore to sing to him beneath the walls of Paris such a Halleluiah as the king had never heard; and what seemed like an angry piece of bravado was really carried out. The emperor appeared with sixty thousand men upon the heights of Montmartre after having ravaged the country around Rheims, Laon, and Soissons, and caused to be intoned by a number of clerks the Halleluiah with which he had threatened Parisian ears, and in the chorus of which this whole army joined.[3] Paris was avenged for this din; for in crossing the Aisne, swollen by storms, on his return, Otto lost his booty, baggage, and all his rearguard (980). It is true that he carried away with him the remembrance of the most formidable psalmody of which history makes mention, and the honour of having planted his lance in one of the gates of Paris; but these were rather frivolous achievements for the son of Otto the Great, and his Halleluiah would certainly have produced much more effect had he taken his sixty thousand men to sing it at Rome.[f]