stars were in heaven, and the wicked on earth began to breathe
more freely; and when the next year went by without any Day of Judgment,
courage revived, and the Church began to make use of the immense gifts
which impulsive sinners had turned over to her. New cathedrals and new
abbeys rose all over the land.

The pathos of the story of Bertha is heightened when we look at her
successor on the throne. Even in her own day Constance, daughter of
Guilhelm Taillefer, Count of Toulouse, was considered harsh and cruel;
one chronicler euphemistically expresses this when he says: "There was
as much constancy in her heart as in her name." She probably came by her
nature honestly enough, for her mother was Arsinda, sister of that
Foulques Nerra of cheerful memory, who, indeed, according to some
accounts, forced the weak Robert to marry his niece. She was, says the
chronicler, surnamed Candida on account of her excessive fairness, and
is not infrequently called Blanche, the "fair queen." Into the rather
primitive court of the French king, surrounded by his monks and probably
longing for the banished Bertha, she came with a scandalous display of
luxury and frivolity.

The south of France, in contact with Italy, with the cultured Moors of
Spain, and, through its Mediterranean ports, with the most advanced
civilization then known, that of the Arabs, was far in advance of the
northern provinces in civilization, or at least in luxury and knowledge
of the arts usually accompanying civilization. Provence, especially,
with its ancient port of Marseilles to recall memories of the most
cultured nation of antiquity, was in material prosperity and in arts
already advancing to that stage of civilization which was to make her,
in the course of the next century, the mother of the first real
literature France had known and of the first extended protest against
the Church of Rome. The troubadours were soon to make Provence and the
Provencal tongue famous, and the Albigenses, with their heresy, were to
invite the destruction of this gay, brilliant, but unsound society. The
south was already far more gay and pleasure loving than the north, where
the ravages of wars foreign and domestic had been more terrible. And out
of the south came Queen Constance, _la Blanche_, to a court where the
king was more monk than king.

The northerners, always disliking the men of Provence, exclaimed in
horror against the manners and the costume of the horde of Provenca