Valence

“ Valence, the true hero of the piece, the "pale fiery man" who can speak with so moving an eloquence, whether he is pleading the wrongs of his townsmen or of Colombe, the rights of Berthold or of himself, is no less masterly a portrait than the Prince, though perhaps less wholly unconventional a character. His grave earnestness, his honour as a man and passion as a lover, move our instinctive sympathy, and he never forfeits it. ”

“ Miss Valence! The young lady that paints. I feared that you were lost to London; for now-a-days the pursuit of the fine arts requires either genius, or fashion, at any rate the latter most, to be at all remunerative. May I show you the way to the drawing-room? I have not often the honour of receiving visitors here. But I think you know how entirely I am the slave of young ladies, Miss Valence." And he held out his delicate hand.
"Lepardo Della Croce, my name is not Valence. I am Clara Vaughan, the only child of him whom in his sleep you murdered." ”

“ De Valence paused, and looked at him, supposing he was going to speak; but finding him still silent, the earl addressed him, though with some hesitation, feeling an inexplicable awe of directly saying to him what he had so easily uttered to his more approachable companion.
"I seek not, illustrious stranger," said he, "to inquire the name you have already intimated must be concealed; but I have sufficient faith in that brilliant circlet around your brows, to be convinced (as none other than the royal hand of Philip could bestow it) that it distinguishes a man of the first honor. ”

“ Things have changed at Valence of late years, for it was once one of the first cities of Dauphiny where religious reform penetrated in the later years of the sixteenth century, and even in the preceding century it had already placed itself under the protection of Louis XI, fearing that some internal upheaval might seriously affect its local life. Valence has always played for safety and that is why it lacks any particularly imposing or edifying aspect to-day. ”

“ The citizens put themselves under the protection of the dauphin, and in 1456 had their rights and privileges confirmed by Louis XI. and put on an equal footing with those of the rest of Dauphiné, the bishops consenting to recognize the suzerainty of the dauphin. In the 16th century Protestantism spread freely under Bishop Jean de Montluc, and Valence became the capital of the Protestants of the province in 1563. ”

“ VALENTINOIS, the name of a countship in France, the chief town of which was Valence (Drôme) . From the 12th to the 15th century Valentinois belonged to a family of Poitiers, which must not be confused with that of the counts of Poitiers. To the detriment of his kinsmen, the lords of St Vallier, Count Louis II. (d . 1419) bequeathed his counties of Valentinois and Diois to the Dauphin Charles, afterwards King Charles VII. ”

“ The church contains the monument of Pius VI., who died at Valence in 1709. A curious house (Maison des Têtes) of the 16th century has a sculptured front with heads of Homer, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, &c. The Maison Dupré-Latour with a beautifully carved doorway and the sepulchral monument known as the Pendentif date from the same century. The library and the museum containing Roman antiquities, sculptures and a picture gallery, are housed in the old ecclesiastical seminary. ”

“ For if he, a man of rude manners, bitter temper, and a love of injuring people, had survived Valens's victory, having also great influence with Valens from the similarity of his disposition and the proximity of their birthplaces, he would have studied the secret inclinations of a prince always inclined to cruelty, and would have shed the blood of many innocent persons. ”

“ Valens himself perished upon the bloody field. How little can we imagine, seated by our peaceful firesides, the dimensions of that wail of misery ascending from a whole army perishing beneath the sabres and the battle-axes of merciless barbarians! This is indeed a lost world. Surely history proves that man is a depraved animal. How happy might this world have been had man been the friend, instead of the foe, of his brother-man!
For twelve years Valentinian was engaged in almost an incessant battle. The Picts and Scots were rushing down upon Britain from the mountains of Caledonia. ”

“ In the year 378 the Emperor Valens himself was slain, almost under the walls of his capital, with two-thirds of his army,--some sixty thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry,--while the victorious Goths, gorged with spoils, advanced to take possession of the defeated and crumbling Empire. From the shores of the Bosporus to the Julian Alps nothing was seen but conflagration, murders, and depredations, and the cry of anguish went up to heaven in accents of almost universal despair.
In such a crisis a great man was imperatively needed, and a great man arose. ”

“ Chapter XI.—In what manner Valens fell into heresy.
I will now pursue the course of my narrative, and will describe the beginning of the tempest which stirred up many and great billows to buffet the Church. Valens, when he first received the imperial dignity, was distinguished by his fidelity to apostolic doctrine. But when the Goths had crossed the Danube and were ravaging Thrace, he determined to assemble an army and march against them; and accordingly resolved not to take the field without the garb of divine grace, but first to protect himself with the panoply of Holy Baptism. ”

“ So when the court was opened, and when the judges exhibited the decrees of the law, though, in accordance with the desire of the emperor, they moderated the severity of the charges brought before them, one general alarm seized all people. For Valens had now so wholly departed from justice, and had become so accomplished in the infliction of injury, that he was like a wild beast in an amphitheatre ”

“ The Emperor Valens, who reigned in the East, which had been yielded to him by his Brother Valentinian, when he took him for his Collegue in the Empire, spared no Pains to reconcile this Sect with that of the Arians, which he greatly favoured. But, finding them no less averse to the Arians than the Orthodox themselves, he began in the Year 366. to persecute them with great Cruelty. To avoid this Persecution they resolved to recur to the Emperor Valentinian, and, embracing the Faith professed by him and the Western Bishops, to put themselves under his Protection. ”

“ Then Valens, as if assisting our friends, subjoined the statement (in which there lurked a secret guile) that the Son of God was not a creature like the other creatures; and the deceit involved in this declaration escaped the notice of the hearers. ”

“ The people of the Forest were obstinate, credulous children. They believed all that the Church taught them, even though many a priest spat at his own conscience.
Martin Valliant had been a priest. He had shed blood, and he slept at night outside the door of a woman’s bed-chamber. The facts were flagrant, fiercely honest. Your pious savage does not love honesty; he lives in a world of make-believe; he will not quarrel with imperfections that spue their slime in dark and hidden corners. ”

“ Valentinian, born in the West, ... reserved the government of it to himself. He ceded to his brother a part of Illyricum on the Danube, and the whole of the East. He established universal toleration by law, and took no part in the sectarian controversies which divided Christendom. Valens adopted the Arian faith, and persecuted the orthodox party. The finances of the empire demanded a reform, which neither of the emperors was in a condition to undertake. They wanted money, and they were ignorant where to seek the long exhausted sources of public wealth. ”

“ At the same time, this circumstance came to crown the other splendid actions of Valens, that, while in the case of others he gave way to such furious violence, that he was even vexed when the severity of their punishment was terminated by death, yet he pardoned Pollentianus, the tribune, a man stained with such enormous wickedness, that at that very time he was convicted on his own confession of having cut out the womb of a living woman and taken from it her child, in order to summon forth spirits from the shades below, and to consult them about a change in the empire. ”

“ CHAPTER XXIII UNCLE JEFFERSON’S STORY John Valiant sat propped up on the library couch, an open magazine unheeded on his knee. The reading-stand beside him was a litter of letters and papers. The bow-window was open and the honeysuckle breeze blew about him, lifting his hair and ruffling the leaves of the papers. In one corner, in a splotch of bright sunshine, lay the bulldog, watching a strayed blue-bottle darting in panic hither and thither near the ceiling. ”

“ His eyes turned from the carven words and strayed to the pleasant sunny foliage outside. An arrogant boast, perhaps, yet in the event well justified. Valiants had held that selfsame slope when the encircling forests had rung with war-whoop and blazed with torture-fire. They had held on through Revolution and Civil War. Good and bad, abiding and lawless, every generation had cleaved stubbornly to its acres. I clinge. His father had clung through absence that seemed to have been almost [Pg 117] exile, and now he, the last Valiant, was come to make good the boast.
His gaze wavered. ”

“ The central point of the piety of Valentinus seems to have been tha mystical contemplation of God; in a letter preserved in Clemens ii. 20, 114, he sets forth that the soul of man is like an inn, which is inhabited by many evil spirits. "But when the Father, who alone is good, looks down and around him, then the soul is hallowed and lies in full light, and so he who has such a heart as this is to be called happy, for he shall behold God." ”

“ It is significant that Valentinus himself is credited with having written a treatise upon the three natures (Schwartz, A porien, i. 292) . Here we have another instance of the theological compromise of the Valentinians. All the other Gnostic systems recognize only a dual division, the children of light and the children of darkness. That the Valentinians should have placed the psychici between the pneumatici and hylici signifies a certain recognition of the Christian Church and its adherents. ”

“ In obedience to the wish of the soldiers that he should associate a colleague with himself, he conferred the title of Augustus upon his brother Valens, and the division of the empire was at last effected,—Valentinian became emperor of the West, Valens of the East. Valentinian maintained the integrity of the empire until his death (in 375) , which deprived the weaker Valens of a trusted counsellor and ally, and was followed by a serious crisis on the Danube. In 376 the Goths, hard pressed by their new foes from the eastward, the Huns, sought and obtained the protection of the Roman Empire. ”

“ For previously in the reign of Julian, when Valentinian was a military tribune, and Valens held a command in the emperor’s guards, they both proved their zeal for the faith; for being constrained to sacrifice, they chose rather to give up their military rank than to do so and renounce Christianity. ”

“ A general named Maximus rose and reigned as Emperor in Britain, and Gratian had too much on his hands in the north to put him down.
In the meantime, a terrible wild tribe called Huns were coming from the West and driving the Goths before them, so that they asked leave from Valens to come across the Danube and settle themselves in Thrace. The reply was so ill managed by Valens' counsellors that the Goths were offended, and came over the river as foes when they might have come as friends; and Valens was killed in battle with them at Adrianople in 378. ”

“ His youth, his beauty, his valour—the act, which Valency well remembered, of his springing forward so as to shield him with his own person—his last words and thoughts devoted to the soft recollection of a beloved sister,—awakened an interest beyond even the present hour, fraught as it was with the chances of life and death. ”

“ By the connivance of the officers of Valens, they were allowed to retain their arms. The avarice of corrupt imperial governors provoked them to revolt; and, in the battle of Adrianople, Valens was defeated. The house into which the wounded emperor was carried was set on fire, and he perished. Gratian, who, since the death of Valentinian I. (375) , had been the ruler of the West, summoned the valiant Theodosius from his estate in Spain, to which he had been banished, to sustain the tottering empire. Gratian made him regent in the East. ”

“ One by one Valiant forced open the tall French windows, till the fading light lay softly over the austere dignity of the apartment. In that somber room, he knew, had had place whatever was most worthy in the lives of his forebears. The thought of generation upon generation had steeped it in human association.
Suddenly he lifted his eyes. Above the desk hung a life-size portrait of a man, in the high soft stock and velvet collar of half a century before. ”

“ Persecution by Valens.—From another peril the Edessenes were saved by their faith and constancy. In the days of their Bishop Barses (361–378) , the Arian Emperor Valens (364–378) , in the course of his persecution of the orthodox, approached the city and summoned the inhabitants to wait upon him in his camp and hear his pleasure there. ”

“ Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses who, working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. ”