"For the reason that the passion which once drew him to Fredegonde and which had cooled for a time, resumed the upper hand with him more hotly than before. He put his second wife out of the way in order to marry the concubine. Thus Fredegonde was married to Chilperic after the murder of Galeswinthe, and became one of the queens of Gaul. At times odd contrasts are seen in the same family. Galeswinthe was an angel, her sister Brunhild, married to Sigebert, was an infernal being. Of exceptional beauty, gifted with an iron will, vindictive to the point of ferocity, animated by an insatiable ambition, and endowed with an intelligence of such high grade that it would have equalled genius had she only not applied her extraordinary faculties to the blackest deeds--Brunhild could not choose but create for herself a fame at which the world grows pale. She first set her cap to revenge Galeswinthe, who was strangled to death by Chilperic at the instigation of Fredegonde. A frightful feud broke out, accordingly, between the two women who now were mortal enemies, and each of whom reigned with her husband over a part of Gaul: poison, the assassin's dagger, conflagrations, civil war, wholesale butcheries, conflicts between fathers and sons, brothers and brothers--such were the means that the two furies employed against each other. The people of Gaul did not, of course, escape the devastating storm. The provinces that were subject to Sigebert and Brunhild were pitilessly ravaged by Chilperic, while the possessions of the latter were in turn laid waste by Sigebert. Thus driven by the fury of their wives, the two brothers fought each other until they were both assassinated." "Oh, if only Gallic blood did not have to flow in torrents, if only these frightful disasters did not heap fresh ills upon our unhappy country, I would be ready to see in the conflict between those two women, who thus blasted the families that they joined, a positive punishment sent down by heaven," observed Loysik. "But, alas, what ills, what frightful sufferings do not these royal hatreds afflict our own people with!" "And did the two female monsters ever find ready tools for their vengeance?"