Parisii

In 52 BCE, when ancient Roman soldiers arrived on the banks of the Seine, they didn't find a gleaming metropolis.

They found murky, water-logged land that was home to an indigenous tribe called the Parisii.

The Romans conquered them, claimed the territory as their own, and built a fort to defend it.

That fort, or what's left of it, is still there today, tucked into what's now known as the Latin Quarter.

In ancient times, the Romans were mainly interested in the territory because it was rich with limestone.

It could be used to build houses and other buildings, so soldiers built mines just outside of the city to gather as much as they could.

When the empire eventually fell, residents renamed it after the people the Romans had displaced, the Parisii, and that's how Lutetia became Paris.

As the years went by, the city grew.

So I'm showing you here a Celtic coin, which comes from a tribe whose capital I'm sure everybody of your audience knows.

It was struck by the Parisii, who gave Paris its name.

And when you look at it, it has a very strange beauty.

It has a beauty that might remind you of the pictures of Picasso or of other classical modern artists.

The lonely fortress of Mont Saint-Michel saw the end of a bitter controversialist, Noël Baide, who died there in 1587.

He wrote Natalis Baido, Doctoris Theologico Parisiensis Annotationum in Erasmi Paraphrases Novi Testamente et Jacobi Fabri Stapulensis Commentarios in Evangelistas Paulicae Epistolas Libri III, Parisii, 1526, in folio.

This work abounds in vehement criticisms and violent declamations.

Erasmus did not fail to reply to his calumniator, and detected no less than eighty-one falsehoods, two hundred and six calumnies, and forty-seven blasphemies.