To which of the two, Catholics or Arians, would Clovis ally himself?
To whom, Arian, pagan, or Catholic, would Clotilde be married?
Assuredly the bishops, priests, and all the Gallo-Roman clergy, for the most part Catholics, desired to see Clovis, that young and audacious Frankish chieftain, take to wife a Catholic rather than an Arian or a pagan, and hoped to convert the pagan Clovis to Christianity much more than an Arian to orthodoxy.
The question between Catholic orthodoxy and Arianism was, at that time, a vital question for Christianity in its entirety, and St.Athanasius was not wrong in attributing to it supreme importance.

It may be presumed that the Catholic clergy, the bishop of Rheims, or the bishop of Langres, were no strangers to the repeated praises which turned the thoughts of the Frankish king towards the Burgundian princess, and the idea of their marriage once set afloat, the Catholics, priesthood or laity, labored undoubtedly to push it forward, whilst the Burgundian Arians exerted themselves to prevent it.

Thus there took place, between opposing influences, religious and national, a most animated struggle.

No astonishment can be felt, then, at the obstacles the marriage encountered, at the complications mingled with it, and at the indirect means employed on both sides to cause its success or failure.

The account of Fredegaire is but a picture of this struggle and its incidents, a little amplified or altered by imagination or the credulity of the period; but the essential features of the picture, the disguise of Aurelian, the hurry of Clotilde, the prudent recollection of Aridius, Gondebaud's alternations of fear and violence, and Clotilde's vindictive passion when she is once out of danger, there is nothing in all this out of keeping with the manners of the time or the position of the actors.
Let it be added that Aurelian and Aridius are real personages who are met with elsewhere in history, and whose parts as played on the occasion of Clotilde's marriage are in harmony with the other traces that remain of their lives.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF TOLBIACUM----144] The consequences of the marriage justified before long the importance which had on all sides been attached to it.