Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/303

Rh cities of France with a population of fifty thousand or over. The major one extends from Flanders at the north to Bordeaux in the southwest. Shaped like an hourglass, it is broadened about Paris and in Aquitaine, being pinched at the waist between Auvergne and Brittany. The seventy-five miles of open country which lie between Paris and Orleans have rightly been termed by Kohl "the Mesopotamia of France." This district is not only surpassingly fertile; it is the strategic center of the country as well. At this point the elbow of the Loire comes nearest to the Seine



in all its course. An invader possessed of this vantage ground would have nearly all of France that was worth having at his feet. If the Huns under Attila, coming from the east in 451, had captured Orleans as Clovis did with his Frankish host at a later time, the whole southwest of France would have been laid open to them. The Saracens, approaching from the opposite direction along this axis, had they been victorious at Tours, could in the same way have swarmed over all the north and the east, and the upper Rhone Valley would have been within reach. The Normans in their turn, coming from the