When she
returned to the bridal chamber, neither the heat of the fire, nor the
impure royal bed could restore the natural heat of her body; and the
king declared that he possessed rather a nun than a wife. Radegundis
succeeded in obtaining a divorce from Chlotar and retired to a cloister,
where she obtained the dignity of a deaconess, an honor which canonical
regulations reserved only to virgins. In the cloister founded by her in
the neighborhood of Poitiers, Radegundis introduced a very strict
discipline, she enriched the house with precious relics, and passed the
rest of her life in pious devotions and expiations for the sins of
Chlotar, who was sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of moral
corruption.

A story is told by Gregory of Tours concerning Ingundis, one of the
concubines of Chlotar, the pious bishop calls her _uxor_ (wife),
however, which is worth repeating. Ingundis, in the full possession of
the love of Chlotar, begged of him to secure a worthy husband for her
sister Aregundia, and expatiated on the physical qualities and moral
virtues of her sister. Chlotar betook himself to her country residence,
and as she pleased him well he married her. Then he returned to Ingundis
and informed her that he had given her sister the best man he could find
in the realm of the Franks, namely, himself. With bitter disappointment
in her heart, she, according to the statement of the chronicler, meekly
submitted, saying: "What may seem good in the eyes of my lord, he may
do; only may thy maid live in the grace of the king."

The fratricidal and internecine wars of Clovis's four sons were yet
surpassed during the next generation by crimes and atrocities which
overstepped all the limits and bounds of nature. Of Chlotar's four sons,
only Sigebert's character is praiseworthy. Gregory relates that Sigebert
was greatly ashamed of the disgraceful alliances of his brothers, who
married daughters of the people of the lowest strata of society and
changed them as lust and caprice prompted. Sigebert, however, married
the daughter of Athanagild, King of the Visigoths. Her name was
Brunehild (_Brunehaut_), a woman of great beauty and excessive vices and
passions, whose name is linked in history with those of the greatest
female criminals of royal blood.

Chilperic, Sigebert's degenerate brother, jealous of the latter's
alliance, asked in marriage Galswintha, Brunehild's sister, but he soon
sacrificed her to the ambition of Fredegond