He was never to see his father again.  Charlemagne, after his son’s departure, went out hunting, according to his custom, in the forest of Ardenne, and continued during the whole autumn his usual mode of life.  “But in January, 814, he was taken ill,” says Eginhard, “of a violent fever, which kept him to his bed.  Recurring forthwith to the remedy he ordinarily employed against fever, he abstained from all nourishment, persuaded that this diet would suffice to drive away or at the least assuage the malady; but added to the fever came that pain in the side which the Greeks call pleurisy; nevertheless the Emperor persisted in his abstinence, supporting his body only by drinks taken at long intervals; and on the seventh day after that he had taken to his bed, having received the holy communion,” he expired about 9 A.M., on Saturday, the 28th of January, 814, in his seventy-first year.

“After performance of ablutions and funeral duties, the corpse was carried away and buried, amid the profound mourning of all the people, in the church he had himself had built; and above his tomb there was put up a gilded arcade with his image and this superscription:  ’In this tomb reposeth the body of Charles, great and orthodox Emperor, who did gloriously extend the kingdom of the Franks, and did govern it happily for forty-seven years.  He died at the age of seventy years, in the year of the Lord 814, in the seventh year of the Indiction, on the 5th of the Kalends of February.’”

If we sum up his designs and his achievements, we find an admirably sound idea and a vain dream, a great success and a great failure.

Charlemagne took in hand the work of placing upon a solid foundation the Frankish Christian dominion by stopping, in the North and South, the flood of barbarians and Arabs, paganism and Islamism.  In that he succeeded; the inundations of Asiatic populations spent their force in vain against the Gallic frontier.  Western and Christian Europe was placed, territorially, beyond reach of attacks from the foreigner and infidel.  No sovereign, no human being, perhaps, ever rendered greater service to the civilization of the world.

Charlemagne formed another conception and made another attempt.  Like more than one great barbaric warrior, he admired the Roman Empire that had fallen, its vastness all in one, and its powerful organization under the hand of a single master.  He thought he could resuscitate it, durably, through the victory of a new people and a new faith, by the hand of Franks and Christians.  With this view he labored to conquer, convert, and govern.  He tried to be, at one and the same time, Caesar, Augustus, and Constantine.  And for a moment he appeared to have succeeded; but the appearance passed away with himself.  The unity of the empire and the absolute power of the emperor were buried in his grave.  The Christian religion and human liberty set to work to prepare for Europe other governments and other destinies.