"Merovingian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and doubtless symbolized to the inhabitants their traditions of a higher standard of civilization. The Porta Nigra, for instance—called Simeon's Gate at present—dates really from the days of the first Merovingian kings, but it looks like a piece of the Coliseum, with its rows of arches in massive red sandstone, the stones held together by iron clamps, and its low, immensely strong double gateway, reminding ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... speculation in the past and of every result of science born in our own time Think of the sunny spaces in the world's history, in each of which one could linger for ever I Athens at her fairest, Borne at her grandest, the glorious savagery of Merovingian courts, the kingdom of Frederick II., the Moors in Spain, the magic of Renaissance Italy—to become a citizen of any one age means a lifetime of endeavour. It is easy to fill one's head with names and years, but that only sharpens my hunger. Then there is the world of art; I would ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermae echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings. ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... twenty, I was connected with the office of the high functionary who has served as my model; and my friends of those days know what a serious political personage I made. The Department also must have strange recollections of that eccentric clerk with the Merovingian beard, who was always the last to arrive and the first to depart, and who never went up to the duke's private office except to ask leave of absence; of a naturally independent character, too, with hands unstained by anything like sycophancy, and so little ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... unwilling admiration the fall of Acre, the defence of Joppa, and the victorious march to Ascalon; and Arabian mothers long awed their infants to silence with the name of the lionhearted Plantagenet. At one time it seemed that the line of Hugh Capet was about to end as the Merovingian and Carlovingian lines had ended, and that a single great monarchy would spread from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. So strong an association is established in most minds between the greatness of a sovereign and the greatness ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... or family of kings to which he belonged is known in history as the Merovingian dynasty. It was so called from Me-ro-vae'us, the father of Childeric ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... which had been as ready to consume each other as to divide the spoils of their Roman subjects. This united phalanx of bishops in Gaul conquered in the end even the excessive degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cruelty of the Merovingian race. Thanks to their perpetual efforts, while the policy of a Clovis made a France, the wickedness of his descendants did not destroy it, but only themselves, and caused a new family to be chosen wherein the same tempered ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... in this country. Italy has already produced a historical novel, of high merit and of still higher promise. In France, the practice has been carried to a length somewhat whimsical. M. Sismondi publishes a grave and stately history of the Merovingian Kings, very valuable, and a little tedious. He then sends forth as a companion to it a novel, in which he attempts to give a lively representation of characters and manners. This course, as it seems to us, has all the disadvantages of a division of labour, and none of its advantages. We understand ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... but marvel at the flourishing proportion attained by the hours in those sunlit spring days; and at dinner, say, her thoughts harking back to luncheon, recalled it by a vigorous effort as an affair of the dim yester-years—a mere blurred memory, faint and vague as a Druidical tenet or a Merovingian squabble. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Roumelian peasant who in our days has placed himself on the ancient throne of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, as Napoleon on the seat of the Merovingian kings, usurping political power by military prowess, lodged and contented himself in the valley of the Nile, was not altogether an uninteresting speculation; and it was with no common curiosity that some fifteen years ago, before he had conquered Syria and ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... very dark in other parts of Western Europe throughout the whole period of barbarian settlement. We shall not endeavour to trace the slight influences that preserved some knowledge of religious books at the Court of the Merovingian kings, or among the Visigoths and Ostrogoths and Burgundians. We prefer to pause at a moment preceding the final onslaught. The letters of Sidonius afford us a few glimpses of the literary condition of Southern Gaul soon ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... the early fifth century and the place of Gaul, of a non-historical kinglet- or queenletdom of Forez or "Seguse" under Amasis (here a feminine name[148]), etc.; nor, though (as may perhaps be remarked again later) things Merovingian bring little luck in literature, need we absolutely bar Chilperics and Alarics, or a reference to "all the beauties of Neustria." But why, in the midst of the generally gracious macedoine of serious and comic loves, and jokes, and adventures, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... forgetting the kitchen and the cucumbers as if they had never been. Her tired body was resting, and her mind, which was never tired, was occupied with the account of early religious foundations under the Merovingian kings. Her eyes were always agreeably employed when they rested upon the sunburned neck and catapult ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... flourished for a time; but eventually the kings of his line became so weak in character and so wicked in conduct as to be unfit to rule, and the country fell into a state of wretched disorder. At last these Merovingian princes became so utterly incapable that the kingly authority fell into the hands of certain state officials called ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene |
