spent the rest of her life in alternations of affectionately fierce devotion to his interests and in scheming against the authority of his guardians. Brunehaut outlived her enemy, Frédégonde, by many years and finally met her death at the order of Frédégonde’s son. After a stormy career during which she compassed much good for the subjects of her son and grandsons and earned her share of hatred from the nobles whom she opposed, she was captured by Clotaire. Her extreme age--she was eighty--did not save her from a brutal end. She was stripped and displayed to his army, then bound by a foot, an arm and her hair to a wild horse which kicked her to death. This hideous deed was done in Paris where now the rue Saint Honoré crosses the rue de l’Arbre Sec, and not far from the site of the house wherein Admiral Coligny was slain, the first victim of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Of all the Merovingian kings only Dagobert I (628-638), son of Clotaire II, proved himself a man of strength, incongruously fighting and praying, massacring captives and building churches, living a vicious life in private and governing with justice and intelligence. “Great king Dagobert” he was called, and he was regarded impartially as a “jolly good fellow” and as a saint. He lived in the palace on the Cité, and he rebuilt the abbey of Saint Denis, invited distant merchants to visit Gaul, dealt out justice to poor and rich alike in unconventional and hearty fashion, and hammered his enemies with the same vigor and enthusiasm. In the century following his the Merovingian line degenerated into a race of “Rois Fainéants” (“Do-nothing Kings”), dissolute, lazy, leaving the task of government to their Mayors of the Palace while they rolled slothfully in ox-carts from the debaucheries of one country house to the coarse pleasures of another. The only upbuilding accomplished during the Merovingian two centuries and a half was the establishment of churches and religious houses. The Frank was not aggressive in the less active relations of his duties as a victor. He was content to learn the language of the conquered race and the mysticism of religion spoke to him winningly. Throughout the years when nothing that fell was restored and the hand was busy striking, at least one kind of constructive impulse was manifest when Clovis built the church in which he was buried on Mons Lucotetius, when his son, Childebert, reared an abbey on the south bank to protect the tunic of Saint Vincent, when on the north bank a church was dedicated to the same saint and another to Saint Laurent, while the south side was further enriched by edifices sacred to Saint Julien and to Saint Séverin, the tutor of Clodoald. It is not the original buildings that we see on these sites to-day, but it is a not uninteresting phase of the French spirit that has reared one structure after another upon ground once consecrated, so that a church stands to-day where a church stood fifteen hundred years ago.