Miniatures of French history

Let any one who would understand the fortunes of the French wander for days in the wooded valley of the Oise. There great forests still clothe the low rounded hills which border the widenings of the slow river, where it saunters through its pasturages and its marsh, with tall, delicate aspens in solemn lines to mark its passage. It is a flat river floor of half a league across and about it the great woods of Compiègne and of Coucy, and all the others that still bear the name of their towns or castles, make a sheet of trees. That sheet of trees may have been a wider thing in the old days, but it remains for any one who will visit it (and it is a countryside that will harbour a man for as long as he will, so broad is it and so deep) the memory of that landscape in which the fortunes of his country changed and re-arose.

But, in particular, the forest of Coucy and the depths of the tall trunks understand how the lords hunted there when the Emperor was still the Emperor, and before France was once again France. See how there still remain in fragments the lines of the Roman roads that led from town to town; all the towns that make up this countryside. Consider Paris, one hard day’s ride away, two or three days’ marches. Remember Laon on its impregnable horse-shoe hill upon the edge of those woods, overlooking the plains to the east and the north, and forming a bulwark and a stronghold for the last of the blood of Charlemagne.

Then, in your mind, see westward and southward the open land, Normandy and Anjou, the Island of France, the gardens of Touraine, Nevers, the high Morvan, the Champagne, crammed with Latinity, and the valleys of the Allier, of the Cher, and of the Vienne, leading upwards and southwards into those dead mountains of the centre which are the frontier against the south. Remember also the good lands that flank Brittany, and that make an approach and a barrier at once for that jealous, silent land. Do all this, and you will understand what happened when the Carolingians fell, and when, in one moment, a new line of kings that stood for Gaul re-arisen was accepted and crowned in the person of its ancestor.

France would be. The Germanies learning the Faith, and informed by the French, were still the Germanies: barbaric, lacking in stone and in letters; lacking in roads. The Latin speech had not followed in them the Latin rule, and the Church which had made them human had hardly welded them into Christendom. It was not possible that Gaul should any longer be confused with these, unless, indeed, they would consent to be ruled from Gaul. That, in their newfound faith and culture, they would not consent to. Yet the imperial line and the old name of Charlemagne, now wasted for nearly two hundred years, pretended to control the issue. But France knew itself again—that is, Gaul knew itself again, through the confusion of how many centuries, and a symbol must be found for France. The line of Charlemagne was exhausted. It could present for claimant to universal rule over the Germanies, as over Gaul, as over Italy, nothing that men respected, no one whom soldiers followed.

But in Gaul itself was a family and a man.

That Robert who had died at Brissarthe, and who had come, no man knew whence, but who was so strong, and who was called “The Strong,” had founded lineage. It was a man of his blood who had held Paris against the Normans. Men of his blood had claimed the crown and kingship once, and had been a part of the Empire, and had yet dropped the claim. But their great estate of land had grown and grown. Their command over many soldiers had grown therewith. They spoke in the Latin tongue; they were of us. And of all of those who were of us they were the richest and, what is much more, the most captaining family of them. Of that great line Hugh was now the man. For a hundred years his father and his father’s father and his father before him had been the true masters of those good river valleys, the Loire, and the Seine, and the Oise. If there was to be government, he, Hugh, must come.

Rheims of the Champagne, the town where Clovis, five hundred years before, had accepted the Faith and made a unity for Gaul, had in this moment for its great archbishop one Adalberon, a man very subtle, and more learned than subtle, stronger in will than either in his learning or in his subtlety, and perceiving future things.

In those days there was between men a division. The great were very great. The mass of men were hardly free, and were all very small. The slaves that had worked for Roman lords in generations now half-forgotten, if they were no longer slaves, were still mean men; and the few that could ride by the day through their estates inland were great above all men—the great bishops, the great counts, the men of the palace, and the masters of the countryside.

These, then—the Empire now plainly in default, and wealthy Gaul, as it were, derelict, and the Germanies, in their barbarism, sheering off—counselled what they should do. They met in an assembly, going up the northern road from Paris to Senlis; and here there was great tumult. For each man came with his armed men about him, and confusedly they knew how mighty a thing was toward.

In that tumult it was Adalberon who spoke: “Charles of Lower Lorraine,” he said, “has many to speak for him, and he says that the throne should come to him by right of lineage. But there should not stand at the head of this kingdom any but he who is great. Hugh, the commander of armies, is known to you by his deeds, by his descent, and by the armed men in his troop, who are many. If you will have government, take him.”

In the further tumult that followed Adalberon persuaded, and Hugh, coming from those who had saved Paris, and who had commanded armament in Gaul for now so long, was acclaimed by the great lords as king.

When the time came for the anointing and the crowning, and for this separation of France again from what was not France, this re-seizing of the nation to itself, Noyon was the town they chose.

Little Noyon, with its vast arcaded church, strong and Roman, amid the woods of the Oise, the altar before which Charlemagne himself had been crowned. To Noyon they came in the midst of those forests of the Oise, by that strict road of the Romans which bridged the river, and which is but one of the many that there meet, as in the centre of a wheel; for the dignity of Noyon, now so forgotten, lay in this—that men could come to it easily, even in those days of difficulty and of old arts forgotten.

In Noyon, then, was Hugh crowned.

He had no name but Hugh. Since, however, men must give names to a family as well as to a man, all the generations after him have remembered what his nickname was. For he had a nickname, this soldier and lord, and from his helmet or his hood he was called Hugh Capet, the man of the head covering—the man of the head or cap. And that is why this family is called Capetian: a little cause for a great thing.