they
raised an army; the Emperor marched against them with his; and the two
hosts met between Colmar and Bale, in a place called _le Champ rouge_
("the Field of Red"). Negotiations were set on foot; and Louis was
called upon to leave his wife Judith and his son Charles, and put
himself under the guardianship of his elder sons. He refused; but, just
when the conflict was about to commence, desertion took place in Louis'
army; most of the prelates, laics, and men-at-arms who had accompanied
him passed over to the camp of Lothair; and the "Field of Red" became
the "Field of Falsehood" (_le Champ du Mensonge_). Louis, left almost
alone, ordered his attendants to withdraw, "being unwilling," he said,
"that any one of them should lose life or limb on his account," and
surrendered to his sons. They received him with great demonstrations of
respect, but without relinquishing the prosecution of their enterprise.
Lothair hastily collected an assembly, which proclaimed him Emperor,
with the addition of divers territories to the kingdoms of Aquitaine and
Bavaria: and, three months afterward, another assembly, meeting at
Compiegne, declared the emperor Louis to have forfeited the crown, "for
having, by his faults and incapacity, suffered to sink so sadly low the
empire which had been raised to grandeur and brought into unity by
Charlemagne and his predecessors." Louis submitted to this decision;
himself read out aloud, in the Church of St. Medard at Soissons, but not
quite unresistingly, a confession, in eight articles, of his faults,
and, laying his baldric upon the altar, stripped off his royal robe, and
received from the hands of Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims, the gray vestment
of a penitent.

Lothair considered his father dethroned for good, and himself henceforth
sole Emperor; but he was mistaken. For years longer the scenes which
have just been described kept repeating themselves again and again;
rivalries and secret plots began once more between the three victorious
brothers and their partisans; popular feeling revived in favor of Louis;
a large portion of the clergy shared it; several counts of Neustria and
Burgundy appeared in arms, in the name of the deposed Emperor; and the
seductive and able Judith came afresh upon the scene, and gained over to
the cause of her husband and her son a multitude of friends. In 834, two
assemblies, one meeting at St. Denis and the other at Thionville,
annulled all the acts of the assembly of Co