sii were thus admirably placed for tapping
the profitable commerce of north-west Europe, and by the waters of the
Eure, lower down the Seine, were able to touch the fertile valley of
the Loire. The northern rivers of Gaul were all navigable by the small
boats of the early traders, and, in contrast with the impetuous sweep
of the Rhone and the Loire in the south and west, flowed with slow and
measured stream:[5] they were rarely flooded, and owing to the
normally mild winters, still more rarely blocked by ice. Moreover, the
Parisian settlement stood near the rich cornland of La Beauce, and to
the north-east, over the open plain of La Valois, lay the way to
Flanders. It was one of the river stations on the line of the
Phoenician traders in tin, that most precious and rare of ancient
metals, between Marseilles and Britain, and in the early Middle Ages
became, with Lyons and Beaucaire, one of the chief fairs of that
historic trade route which the main lines of railway traffic still
follow to-day. The island now known as the Cite, which the founders of
Paris chose for their stronghold, was the largest of the group which
lay involved in the many windings of the Seine, and was embraced by a
natural moat of deep waters. To north and south lay hills, marshes and
forests, and all combined to give it a position equally adapted for
defence and for commerce.

[Footnote 5: The Seine takes five hours to flow through the seven
miles of modern Paris.]

[Illustration: THE CITE.]

The Parisii were a small tribe of Gauls whose island city was the home
of a prosperous community of shipmen and merchants, but it is not
until the Conquest of Gaul by the Romans that Lutetia, for such was
its Romanised name, joins the great pageant of history. It was--

"Armed Caesar falcon-eyed,"[6]

who saw its great military importance, built a permanent camp there
and made it a central _entrepot_ for food and munitions of war. And
when in 52 B.C. the general rising of the tribes under Vercingetorix
threatened to scour the Romans out of Gaul and to destroy the whole
fabric of Caesar's ambition, he sent his favourite lieutenant,
Labienus, to seize Lutetia where the Northern army of the Gauls was
centred. Labienus crossed the Seine at Melun, fixed his camp on a spot
near the position of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and began
the first of the historic sieges for which Paris is so famous. But the
Gaulish commander burnt the bridges, fired the c