Excerpt from Stories From French History Rome did not destroy the countries she conquered, but added them to her Empire, giving their people the advan tages enjoyed by her own citizens. She imposed on them, willing or not, her language and her laws, and organized their trade, education, and local government. Splendid roads ran from point to point of the Empire, mountains were crossed, forests pierced, rivers bridged; thus there was constant communication by chariot, horse, or running post between the cities, and regular intercourse with Rome. The Roman settlers intermarried With the natives of their colonies. The Latin strain is strong in France to this day: in the south, women's classical Roman faces often Show descent from the conquerors of two thousand years ago. Caesar found in Gaul a large and beautiful country guarded by mountains and seas, its plains varied by hills and valleys, among which a thousand lesser rivers and streams flowed into the great four that were then, as now, the characteristic boundaries of its provinces and popula tions: the Seine, the river of Paris, in later centuries the chief waterway of French civilization the Wide and wind ing Loire, river of the west, flowing to the Atlantic through a land of fertility and romance; the Garonne, rising in the Spanish mountains, and in Caesar's days better known and more navigated than any except the noble rhone, that divides the southern provinces in his magnificent course from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.