Who were, and whence came these Franks, who in such small numbers and little time possessed themselves of all the Gauls, which in ten years Cæsar could not entirely reduce? I am reading an author who commences by these words: "The Franks from whom we descend." ... Ha! my friend, who has told you that you descend in a right line from a Frank? Clovodic, whom we call Clovis, probably had not more than twenty thousand men, badly clothed and armed, when he subjugated about eight or ten millions of Welsh or Gauls, held in servitude by three or four Roman legions. We have not a single family in France which can furnish, I do not say the least proof, but the least probability, that it had its origin from a Frank. When the pirates of the Baltic Sea came, to the number of seven or eight thousand, to give Normandy in fief, and Brittany in _arrière fief_, did they, leave any archives by which it may be seen whether they were the fathers of all the Normans of the present day? It has been a long time believed that the Franks came from the Trojans. Ammianus Marcellinus, who lived in the fourth century, says: "According to several ancient writers, troops of fugitive Trojans established themselves on the borders of the Rhine, then a desert." As to Æneas, he might easily have sought an asylum at the extremity of the Mediterranean, but Francus, the son of Hector, had too far to travel to go towards Düsseldorf, Worms, Solm, Ehrenbreitstein. Fredegarius doubts not that the Franks at first retired into Macedonia, and carried arms under Alexander, after having fought under Priam; on which alleged facts the monk Otfried compliments the emperor, Louis the German. The geographer of Ravenna, less fabulous, assigns the first habitation of the horde of Franks among the Cimbrians, beyond the Elbe, towards the Baltic Sea. These Franks might well be some remains of these barbarian Cimbri defeated by Marius; and the learned Leibnitz is of this opinion. It is very certain that, in the time of Constantine, beyond the Rhine, there were hordes of Franks or Sicambri, who lived by pillage. They assembled under bandit captains, chiefs whom historians have had the folly to call kings. Constantine himself pursued them to their haunts, caused several to be hanged, and others to be delivered to wild beasts, in the amphitheatre of Trier, for his amusement. Two of their pretended kings perished in this manner, at which the panegyrists of Constantine are in ecstasies.