21. In the fifty-first year of his reign king Clothar set out for the door of the blessed Martin with many gifts and coming to the tomb of the bishop just mentioned at Tours, and repeating all the deeds he had perhaps done heedlessly, and praying with loud groaning that the blessed confessor of God would obtain God’s forgiveness for his faults and by his intercession blot out what he had done contrary to reason, he then returned, and in the fifty-first year of his reign, while hunting in the forest of Cuise, he was seized with a fever and returned thence to a villa in Compiègne. There he was painfully harassed by the fever and said: “Alas![BH] What do you think the king of heaven is like when he kills such great kings in this way?” Laboring under this pain he breathed his last, and his four sons carried him with great honor to Soissons and buried him in the church of St. Medard. He died the next day in the revolving year after Chramnus had been slain. [22. The four sons of Clothar make “a lawful division” of his kingdom. To Charibert is assigned Paris for his capital, to Gunthram, Orleans, to Chilperic, Soissons, to Sigibert, Rheims. 23. The Huns attack Sigibert and Chilperic takes the opportunity to seize some of his cities. Sigibert recovers them.] 24. When king Gunthram had taken his part of the realm like his brothers, he removed the patrician[BI] Agricola and gave the office of patrician to Celsus, a man of tall stature, strong shoulders, strong arms and boastful words, ready in retort and skilled in the law. And then such a greed for possessing came upon him that he often took the property of the churches and made it his own. Once when he heard a passage from the prophet Isaiah being read in the church, which says: “Woe to those who join house to house and unite field to field even to the boundaries of the place,” he is said to have exclaimed: “It is out of place to say; woe to me and my sons.” But he left a son who died without children and left the greater part of his property to the churches which his father had plundered. 25. The good king Gunthram first took a concubine Veneranda, a slave belonging to one of his people, by whom he had a son Gundobad. Later he married Marcatrude, daughter of Magnar, and sent his son Gundobad to Orleans. But after she had a son Marcatrude was jealous, and proceeded to bring about Gundobad’s death. She sent poison, they say, and poisoned his drink. And upon his death, by God’s judgment she lost the son she had and incurred the hate of the king, was dismissed by him, and died not long after. After her he took Austerchild, also named Bobilla. He had by her two sons, of whom the older was called Clothar and the younger Chlodomer.