"Poor Galeswinthe! But why did her husband Chilperic indulge such ferocity toward her?"
"For the reason that the passion which once drew him to Fredegonde and which had cooled for a time, resumed the upper hand with him more hotly than before. He put his second wife out of the way in order to marry the concubine. Thus Fredegonde was married to Chilperic after the murder of Galeswinthe, and became one of the queens of Gaul. At times odd contrasts are seen in the same family. Galeswinthe was an angel, her sister Brunhild, married to Sigebert, was an infernal being. Of exceptional beauty, gifted with an iron will, vindictive to the point of ferocity, animated by an insatiable ambition, and endowed with an intelligence of such high grade that it would have equalled genius had she only not applied her extraordinary faculties to the blackest deeds—Brunhild could not choose but create for herself a fame at which the world grows pale. She first set her cap to revenge Galeswinthe, who was strangled to death by Chilperic at the instigation of Fredegonde. A frightful feud broke out, accordingly, between the two women who now were mortal enemies, and each of whom reigned with her husband over a part of Gaul: poison, the assassin's dagger, conflagrations, civil war, wholesale butcheries, conflicts between fathers and sons, brothers and brothers—such were the means that the two furies employed against each other. The people of Gaul did not, of course, escape the devastating storm. The provinces that were subject to Sigebert and Brunhild were pitilessly ravaged by Chilperic, while the possessions of the latter were in turn laid waste by Sigebert. Thus driven by the fury of their wives, the two brothers fought each other until they were both assassinated."
"Oh, if only Gallic blood did not have to flow in torrents, if only these frightful disasters did not heap fresh ills upon our unhappy country, I would be ready to see in the conflict between those two women, who thus blasted the families that they joined, a positive punishment sent down by heaven," observed Loysik. "But, alas, what ills, what frightful sufferings do not these royal hatreds afflict our own people with!"
"And did the two female monsters ever find ready tools for their vengeance?"
"The murders that they did not themselves commit with the aid of poison, they caused to be committed with the dagger. Fredegonde, whose depravity surpassed Messalina's of old, surrounded herself with young pages; she intoxicated them with unspeakable voluptuousness; she threw their reasoning into disorder by means of philters that she herself concocted; by means of these she rendered them frenetic, and then she would hurl them against the appointed victims. It was by such means that she contrived the assassination of King Sigebert, Brunhild's husband, and that she succeeded in poisoning their son Childebert. It was by such means that she caused a large number of her enemies to be despatched with the dagger and, if the chronicles are to be trusted, her own husband Chilperic was numbered among her victims."
"So, then, that veritable fury spewed out of hell—Fredegonde—spared not even her own husband?"
"Some historians, at least, lay his murder to her door; others charge it to Brunhild. Both theories may be correct; the one Queen, as well as the other, had an interest in putting Chilperic out of the way—Brunhild in order to avenge her sister Galeswinthe, Fredegonde in order to escape the punishment that she feared for the depravity of her life."
"And did punishment finally overtake the abominable woman?"
"Queen Fredegonde died peaceably in her bed in the year 597 at the age of fifty-five years. Her funeral was pompously celebrated by the Catholic priests and she was buried in consecrated ground in the basilica of St. Germain-des-Pres at Paris. In the language of the panegyrists of our Kings, 'Fredegonde reigned long, happy and ably.' At her death she left her kingdom intact to her son Clotaire the younger."
A shudder of horror passed over the hearers of this shocking history. The royal abominations stood in such strong contrast to the morals of the inhabitants of the Valley, that these good people imagined they had heard the narrative of some frightful dream, the fabric of the delusion of a fever.