ced in 506 by a great basilica dedicated
to SS. Peter and Paul,--whose length the king measured by the distance
he could hurl his axe--and the famous monastery of St. Genevieve.[22]

[Footnote 22: Her figure was a favourite subject for the sculptors of
Christian churches. She usually bears a taper in her hand and a devil
is seen peering over her shoulder. This symbolises the miraculous
relighting of the taper after the devil had extinguished it. The taper
was long preserved at Notre Dame.]

The conversion of Clovis is the capital fact of early French history.
Clotilde had long[23] importuned him to declare himself a Christian,
and he had consented to the baptism of their firstborn, but the
infant's death within a week seemed an admonition from his own jealous
gods. A second son, however, recovered from grievous sickness at his
wife's prayers, and this, aided perhaps by a shrewd insight into the
trend of events, induced him to lend a more willing ear to the
teachers of the new Faith. In 496 the Franks were at death grapple
with their German foes at Tolbiac. Clovis, when the fight went against
him, invoked the God of the Christians and prayed to be delivered from
his enemies. His cry was heard and the advent of the new Lord of
Battles was winged with victory.

[Footnote 23: If we may believe Gregory of Tours, her arguments were
vituperative rather than convincing. "Your Jupiter," said she, "is
_omnium stuprorum spurcissimus perpetrator_."]

The conversion of Clovis was a triumph for the Church: in her struggle
with the Arian heresy in Gaul, she was now able to enforce the
arguments of the pen by the edge of the sword. Her scribes are tender
to his memory, for his Christianity was marked by few signs of grace.
He remained the same savage monarch as before, and did not scruple to
affirm his dynasty and extend his empire by treachery and by the
assassination of his kinsmen. To the Franks, Jesus was but a new and
more puissant tribal deity. "Long live the Christ who loves the
Franks," writes the author of the prologue to the Salic law; and when
the bishop was one day reading the Gospel story of the Passion, the
king, _qui moult avait grand compassion_, cried out: "Ah! had I been
there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ." Nor was their
ideal of kinship any loftier. Their realm was not a trust, but a
possession to be divided among their heirs, and the jealousy and
strife excited by the repeated partitions among