Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE CHILDHOOD OF CLOTILDA '"THE kingdom of the Burgundians appears on the threshold of modern times as one of those many ephemeral creations whose ruins were to strew the pages of history before at length a nation rose up capable of resisting the destructive power of centuries. The whole history of the Burgundian people gives evidence of something precarious and incomplete, and the most striking pages in its annals are those that record the catastrophes by which it was rapidly brought to its ruin. And yet its existence was not without advantages for civilisation ; it gave St Clotilda to the world, and this single act would suffice to cast a certain lustre on its memory. At the time of the birth of the Saint whose life will be recorded in these pages, the Burgundians had already passed through the greater portion of their brief and dramatic career. A generation had passed away since the year 437, when the kingdom which they had founded on the banks of the Rhine had perished beneath the onslaught of the Huns, a kingdom whose memory still lives, preserved in the legends at once so tender and so awe-inspiring of German folk-lore. They now occupied Southern Gaul, of which they had taken possession, partly as B3 '7 conquerors, partly as fugitives after the misfortunes which had gone far towards putting an end to their national existence. Having first taken refuge in the Savoy Alps, they had made their way down the beautiful valleys of the Saone and the Rhone from Langres as far as Avignon and the Durance. There they had founded a kingdom which, during the closing years of the fifth century, seemed destined to play a great role in history. Established between Roman Italy, the last preserver of the imperial traditions, and the conquering kingdom of the Visigoths, fr... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.