Sainte Geneviève died in 509 and the citizens of grateful Paris over which she had watched in wise tenderness for fourscore years, made her their patron saint. The hill that had been known as Mons Lucotetius they called Mont Sainte Geneviève, and on it they built a chapel to honor and protect her grave. Clovis replaced the little oratory by a church as long as the mighty swing of his battle-axe, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul and serving as the abbey church of a religious establishment which bore Sainte Geneviève’s name. Except for a dormitory and refectory this monastery was torn down in the middle of the eighteenth century to give place to a new church of Sainte Geneviève, secularized to-day and known as the Pantheon. The abbey church, built and rebuilt, was destroyed during the Revolution, the tower (called the Tower of Clovis, but really belonging to a later period) being all that is left of these historic structures. The reaction against religion in those turbulent revolutionary years made it no sacrilege to burn the good saint’s bones on the Grève, but some of the devoted preserved the ashes which rest now in a stone sarcophagus, elaborately canopied, in the neighboring church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont built in the twelfth century as a church for the dependents of the Abbey. The comparatively peaceful and prosperous Roman period of five hundred years was followed by five centuries of strife and disaster at the hands of the northern tribes. The Roman Empire had found in Gaul the last stronghold of its civilization. There were large cities, fine buildings, public utilities, institutions of learning. To the barbarians, a youthful race at the destructive stage, these represented but so many things to be destroyed. Terrible and repeated onslaughts ousted the Romans, and then the victors became embroiled with new tribes who sought to drive them out. Palaces and houses were destroyed, fields and vineyards were laid waste. Paris, the stronghold of the early Merovingians, suffered less than the other important towns of Gaul, but the Franks had no standards of fair living, and they did not build up where time or their own ferocity had cast down. Tottering walls were bolstered with rough buttresses, new dwellings were square hovels of the same heavy stonework, farming languished, commerce died.