28 CAROLINGIAN PORTRAITS

risen in revolt against the domination of the Emperor, his uncle.

He was only eighteen years old, and his advisers in Italy had
been encouraging in him a spirit of resentment and alarm on the
score that he had been given no assurance of his future. Rashly
the young man, pushed by his counselors, consented to blockade
the passes over the Alps into France. Soon word came that Louis
the Pious had gathered an immense army and already had reached
Chalon-sur-Sa6ne on his march toward Italy itself. Bernard saw
at once that his position was hopeless. He fled in haste to Chalon
and begged mercy from his royal uncle. Sentence of death was
passed upon him, commuted by Louis to what seemed, in a
strange mercy, to be a more lenient punishment, the sentence
of blinding. This was carried out shortly after Easter 818, and
two days later Bernard died of the shock. So, too, were blinded, or
sent into exile, a number of his friends of high standing. Among
them, to the wonder of many men, was Theodulf, the poet, wit,
courtier, and prelate of power under Charles the Great. He now
lost his bishopric of Orl6ans and was sent to prison within the
monastery of Angers, where he spent nearly all the rest of his
life, constantly protesting his innocence. At last, if chronicle be
true, he was released; but only to die. The Church still sings his
hymn, Gloria, laus et honor, once long ago written by him and
sung in his hearing by a choir of children on Palm Sunday and
answered in chorus of refrain by the people at large.
The severity of these punishments sprang, we may thinkas had sprung, four years before, that purging of his Palace of
Aachen-from fear in the Emperor's mind. No heir, no rival,
must threaten his security. Soon he decided that it would be safer
to place behind monastic walls his three brothers of illegitimate
birth: Drogo, Hugh, and Thierry.
Further trouble, and harder to bear, now fell upon him. In
October 818 his queen and Empress, Irmengard, died. The loss
drove him into a melancholy which lasted for many weeks; his
friends at Court began to fear that unless some stimulus of comfort were found to arouse him from his passive state, he might even
abandon his throne and enter religious life within a cloister. In
haste they searched throughout Frankland for young women of
rank, beauty, and distinction. Their search was rewarded. In