Chilperic, whom Gregory of Tours brands as the Herod and Nero of his time, plumed himself on his piety, was concerned at the blasphemies of the Jews, and forced on them conversion or exile at the sword's point. He composed Latin hymns, and discussed the nature of the Trinity with Gregory and the bishop of Albi. He sought to reform the alphabet by the addition of new letters which corresponded to the guttural sounds in the Frankish tongue, and ordered that the old alphabet should be erased from the children's books with pumice stone in all the cities of his kingdom, and the reformed alphabet substituted for it. Among the wives of Clothaire I. was the gentle Radegonde, who turned with horror from the bloody scenes of the palace to live in works of charity with the poor and suffering, and in holy communion with priests and bishops. She was at length consecrated a deaconess by St. Medard, donned the habit of a nun, and founded a convent at Poitiers, where the poet Fortunatus had himself ordained a priest that he might be near her. Radegonde's memory is dear to us in England, for it was a small company of her nuns who settled on the Green Croft by the river bank below Cambridge, and founded a priory whose noble church and monastic buildings were subsequently incorporated in Jesus College when the nunnery was suppressed by Bishop Alcock in 1496. [Illustration: ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS.] [Illustration: ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE.] To St. Germain of Autun, made bishop in 555, Paris owes one of her earliest ecclesiastical foundations. His influence over Childebert, king of Paris, was great. He obtained an order that those who refused to destroy pagan idols in their possession were to answer to the king, and when Childebert and his warriors, seized by an irresistible fighting impulse, marched into Spain, and were bought off the siege and sack of Saragossa by the present of the tunic of St. Vincent, he induced the king to found the abbey and church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des Prés), to receive the relic. In Childebert's reign was begun on the site of the present Cathedral of Notre Dame a splendid basilica, so magnificently decorated that it was compared to Solomon's Temple for the beauty and the delicacy of its art. During this great outburst of zeal and devotion another monastery was established and dedicated to St. Vincent, which subsequently became associated with the name of the earlier St. Germain of Auxerre (l'Auxerrois).