ot at
all for the service of God, entered a nunnery for no other reason.

There were other women who, for other causes, did likewise. In particular,
there was Radegonde who founded a cloister of her own, one that within
high walls had the gardens, porticoes, and baths of a Roman villa, but
which in the deluge of worldly sin, was, Thierry says, intended to be an
ark. There Radegonde received high ecclesiastics and laymen of position,
among others Fortunatus, a poet, young and attractive, whom the abbess,
young and attractive herself, welcomed so well that he lingered, supping
nightly at the cloister, composing songs in which were strained the honey
of Catullus, and, like him, crowned with roses.[32]

But Radegonde was not Lesbia, and Fortunatus, though a poet, confined his
licence to verse. Together they collaborated in the first romance of pure
sentiment that history records, one from which the abbess passed to
sanctity, and the poet to fame. Thereafter the story persisting may have
suggested some one of the pedestals that antiquity never learned to
sculpture and to which ladies were lifted by their knights.

Meanwhile love had assumed another shape. Radegonde, before becoming an
abbess, had been a queen. As a consequence she had prerogatives which
other women lacked. It was not every one that could entertain a tarrying
minstrel. It was not every one that would. The nun generally was
emancipated from man as thoroughly as the hetaira had been from marriage.
But the latter in renouncing matrimony did not for that reason renounce
love and there were many cloistered girls who, in renouncing man, did not
renounce love either. One of them dreamed that on a journey to the
fountain of living waters, a form appeared that pointed at a brilliant
basin, to which, as she stooped, Radegonde approached and put about her a
cloak that, she said, was sent by the girl's betrothed.

Radegonde was then dead and a saint. The dream of her, particularly the
gift, more especially its provenance, seemed so ineffable that the girl
could think of nothing else save only that when at last the betrothed did
come, the nuptial chamber should be ready. She begged therefore that there
be given her a little narrow cell, a narrow little tomb, to which, the
request granted, other nuns led her. At the threshold she kissed each of
them, then she entered; the opening was walled and within, with her mystic
spouse, the bride of Christ remained.[33]

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