The life of St Denis of Paris
He worked alongside a priest named Rusticus and a deacon named Eleutherius, and together the three won so many converts that the pagan priests of the city grew alarmed and had them arrested. All three were beheaded on the hill above the city that has since been called Montmartre, the Mountain of the Martyrs.
A famous later legend holds that after his head was struck off, Dionysius rose, took up his own head, and walked several miles still preaching before he finally fell, and that a church, later a great abbey where the kings of France would be buried, was raised on the spot where he came to rest. The earliest written account of his life dates from centuries after his death and is regarded by scholars as largely legendary, and for a long time Dionysius of Paris was mistakenly identified with an entirely different man, the first-century Dionysius the Areopagite converted by the apostle Paul in Athens, a confusion the Church itself has since corrected. What can be said with more confidence is that a bishop of Paris and his companions were martyred for the faith, and that their memory shaped the city that grew up around their grave.
