From manners such as his and from times such as those, there was but one refuge--the cloister, though there was also the tomb. They were not always dissimilar. In the monasteries, there was a thick vapor of crapulence and bad dreams. They were vestibules of hell. The bishops, frankly barbarian, coarse, gluttonous, and worse, went about armed, pillaging as freely as the barons. Monks less adventurous, but not on that account any better, saw Satan calling gayly at them, "Thou art damned." Yet, however drear their life, it was a surcease from the apoplexy of the epoch. Kings descended from their thrones to join them. To the abbeys and priories came women of rank. In these latter retreats there was some suavity, but chiefly there was security from predatory incursions, from husbands quite as unwelcome, from the passions and violence of the turbulent world without. But the security was not over-secure. Women that escaped behind the bars, saw those bars shaken by the men from whom they had fled, saw the bars sunder, and themselves torn away. That, though, was exceptional. In the cloister generally there was safety, but there were also regrets, and, with them, a leisure not always very adequately filled. To some, the cloister was but another form of captivity in which they were put not of their own volition, but by way of precaution, to insure a security which may not have been entirely to their wish. Yet, from whatever cause existence in these retreats was induced, very rapidly it became the fashion. There had been epochs in which women wore garments that were brief, there were others in which their robes were long. It was a question of mode. Then haircloth came in fashion. In Greece, women were nominally free. In Rome, they were unrestrained. In Europe at this period, they were cloistered. It was the proper thing, a distinction that lifted them above the vulgar. Bertheflede, a lady of very exalted position, who, Grégoire de Tours has related, cared much for the pleasures of the table and not 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]