CHAPTER VIII .-- -THE MEROVINGIANS.
[Illustration: The Sluggard King Journeying----156] In its beginning and in its end the line of the Merovingians is mediocre and obscure.

Its earliest ancestors, Meroveus, from whom it got its name, and Clodion, the first, it is said, of the long-haired kings, a characteristic title of the Frankish kings, are scarcely historical personages; and it is under the qualification of sluggard kings that the last Merovingians have a place in history.

Clovis alone, amidst his vices and his crimes, was sufficiently great and did sufficiently great deeds to live forever in the course of ages; the greatest part of his successors belong only to genealogy or chronology.

In a moment of self-abandonment and weariness, the great Napoleon once said, "What trouble to take for half a page in universal history!" Histories far more limited and modest than a universal history, not only have a right, but are bound to shed their light only upon those men who have deserved it by the eminence of their talents or the important results of their passage through life; rarity only can claim to escape oblivion.

And save two or three, a little less insignificant or less hateful than the rest, the Merovingian kings deserve only to be forgotten.