by a mysterious, magic precious stone in a ring which he had presented
to his queen. As long as she wore the ring, he could not live away from
her. At last the queen fell ill and came to die. But grudging the stone
to any other woman and desiring that the king might not love another as
he loved her, she concealed the ring under her tongue and died.
Charlemagne unable to live without her did not allow her to be buried,
but carried her with him day and night on the journey through his vast
realm. An inexpressible sin, due to the magic ring in her mouth, ensued.
At last, when Charlemagne was absent, the corpse of the dead woman was
examined and the ring was found in her mouth. A knight took the ring
away and kept it. Charlemagne had the queen buried at once. But all the
love which he bore to his dead wife, he now transferred to the knight as
long as the latter possessed the stone. The knight, annoyed by this love
and the shame thereof, threw away the stone into a morass. Charlemagne
conceived such an affection for the place where the ring lay that he
built there the Cathedral of Our Lady at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). And,
as a higher irresistible power had brought about the moral sins as well
as other sins bearing the character of incest, Saint AEgidius and Saint
Theodolin secured for him atonement, expiation, and absolution.

The court life at the time of Charlemagne, loose as it was, had its
great redeeming features; it sank, however, under his weak successors
into the utmost decay and degradation. The dynasty perished with Ludwig
the Child (A. D. 911). Charles the Fat, the unworthy descendant of his
great sire Charlemagne, had given the world, during his calamitous
reign, the melancholy spectacle of a king publicly accusing his wife,
Richardis, of adultery with his own chancellor, Liutward, Bishop of
Vercelli. But Richardis asserted that she was a virgin though she had
been living with her husband for twelve years. The emperor forced an
ordeal (A. D. 887) to free her from the terrible accusation: and an
ordeal remained, during the entire Middle Ages, the only means for an
accused woman to purify herself and redeem her honor. This special
ordeal is minutely described in the so-called _Kaiserchronik_ (Chronicle
of Emperors), how Richardis slipped into a garment made for that
purpose, which was set on fire at all four ends, at her feet and arms,
simultaneously. In a short hour the garment burned from her body; the
wax dripp