Along Germany's River of Romance, the Moselle; The Little Traveled Country of Alsace and Lorraine Its Personality, Its People, and Its Associations (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1913. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... above, are a better witness to the sometime splendours of Imperial Treves than either the amphitheatre or the Basilica. One of the two huge flanking towers is still partly standing, and the subterranean passages for the servants and the heating apparatus are so clear in purpose still that for a long time the palace was mistaken for the Baths, and called so. But that which remains, for all the artistic beauty which seems always to accompany decay, is as little definite as is the history of Constantine's rule in Treves. To hear voices from the Constantine epoch in Treves one has to cross the palace square again, along the stern wall of the Basilica, past the school of the Ursuline nuns, through the Liebfrauengasse, and so to the front of the Cathedral. The apse is an eleventh-century structure, but the middle portion of the building is certainly fourth-century, and, for all except the sceptics, a portion of the palace built by Constantine the Great for Saint Helena. St. Ambrose says that she was the daughter of a little innkeeper of Drepanum in Bithynia, but St. Ambrose failed to reckon with the subsequent loyalty of the Treviri. There are old men in Treves who will show you the exact spot on which her father's wine-shop stood when his pretty daughter attracted the eye of a Roman officer, by name Constantius. So long as Constantius remained a simple legionary officer Helena also remained at his side, but when Diocletian raised him to equal rank with himself, he required that Constantius should repudiate his marriage with the innkeeper's daughter of Treves, and take to wife Theodora, the daughter of the persecutor Maximian. Helena was not only compelled to leave her husband but was robbed also of her little son. The little son became Constantine, r the fir...