If you halve it for the second figure, you get 42.
And if you double it for the second figure, you get 48.
[Illustration: Plate II.--THE BIBLE OF AMIENS. NORTHERN PORCH BEFORE RESTORATION.]
Add 1, for the third figure, to each of these numbers, and you get 421 and 481, which two dates you will please fasten well down, and let there be no drifting about of them in your heads.
For the first is the date of the birth of Venice herself, and her dukedom, (see 'St. Mark's Rest,' Part I., p. 30); and the second is the date of birth of the French Venice, and her kingdom; Clovis being in that year crowned in Amiens.
3. These are the great Birthdays--Birthdates--in the fifth century, of Nations. Its Deathdays we will count, at another time.
Since, not for dark Rialto's dukedom, nor for fair France's kingdom, only, are these two years to be remembered above all others in the wild fifth century; but because they are also the birth-years of a great Lady, and greater Lord, of all future Christendom--St. Genevieve, and St. Benedict.
Genevieve, the 'white wave' (Laughing water)--the purest of all the maids that have been named from the sea-foam or the rivulet's ripple, unsullied,--not the troubled and troubling Aphrodite, but the Leucothea of Ulysses, the guiding wave of deliverance.
White wave on the blue--whether of pure lake or sunny sea--(thenceforth the colours of France, blue field with white lilies), she is always the type of purity, in active brightness of the entire soul and life--(so distinguished from the quieter and restricted innocence of St. Agnes),--and all the traditions of sorrow in the trial or failure of noble womanhood are connected with her name; Ginevra, in Italian, passing into Shakespeare's Imogen; and Guinevere, the torrent wave of the British mountain streams, of whose pollution your modern sentimental minstrels chant and moan to you, lugubriously useless;--but none tell you, that I hear, of the victory and might of this white wave of France.
4. A shepherd maid she was--a tiny thing, barefooted, bare-headed--such as you may see running wild and innocent, less cared for now than their sheep, over many a hillside of France and Italy. Tiny enough;--seven years old, all told, when first one hears of her: "Seven times one are seven, (I am old, you may trust me, linnet, linnet[10])," and all around her--fierce as the Furies, and wild as the winds of heaven--the thunder of the Gothic armies, reverberate over the ruins of the world.