Gaul at the end of the fifth century the marriage of Clovis and Clotilde was, for the public of the period, for the barbarians and for the Gallo-Romans, a great matter.  Clovis and the Franks were still pagans; Gondebaud and the Burgundians were Christians, but Arians; Clotilde was a Catholic Christian.  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 easily 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 was no stranger to the repeated praises which turned the thoughts of the Frankish King toward the Burgundian princess, and the idea of their marriage once set afloat, the Catholics, priesthood or laity, labored undoubtedly to push it forward, while 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.

The consequences of the marriage justified before long the importance which had on all sides been attached to it.  Clotilde had a son; she was anxious to have him baptized, and urged her husband to consent.  “The gods you worship,” said she, “are naught, and can do naught for themselves or others; they are of wood or stone or metal.”  Clovis resisted, saying:  “It is by the command of our gods that all things are created and brought forth.  It is plain that your God hath no power; there is no proof even that he is of the race of the gods.”  But Clotilde prevailed; and she