Having gone so far, Bernard would have done wisely to abide altogether by the arbitrament of the sword. Instead of doing this he held back and negotiated. Relying on the emperor’s well-known character for justice and moderation Bernard left his army and went to a conference at Chalons-sur-Saône. He soon found that he had made a fatal mistake. He was treated as a criminal on trial, not as a prince who came to negotiate terms of peace. The conference adjoined to Aachen, and there Bernard and his chief adherents were judged and condemned. The council doomed the accused to death, but Lewis, half-mindful of the safe-conduct that his ambassadors had promised, commuted the sentence to blinding. [Sidenote: Death of Bernard of Italy, 818.] The cruel order was executed, but so clumsily was it carried out, that Bernard died of the shock. Rumour added that it was the empress Hermengarde who had bribed the executioners to do their work so badly. The remorse that seized the emperor for his broken safe-conduct and the death of his nephew never ceased to vex his soul for all his remaining years. It was the only grave moral offence that he had ever committed, and his tender conscience would give him no rest. Within a few months after Bernard’s death Lewis was visited by a calamity which he considered the first instalment of the divine vengeance for the deed. On his return from an expedition to Brittany he was met by the news of the death of his wife Hermengarde. It was whispered that she had been largely guilty in the matter of her nephew’s death, and that she was now paying the penalty. Lewis at any rate seems to have had this idea. He had been deeply attached to his imperious wife, and leant much on her guidance. Deprived of her he fell into a state of morbid melancholy, far worse than any he had yet experienced. He shut himself up with his grief, neglected state affairs, and talked of retiring into a cloister. After some months his ministers found the situation growing so impossible that they took every means to rouse him. It was, we are told, his bishops who took the strange step of urging on him that he must marry again as a public duty; his seclusion injured the realm, and he must remember that man was not meant to live alone. When the emperor would neither go to seek a wife nor take a princess whom he had not seen on another’s recommendation, his ministers brought to his court all the fairest of the daughters of the counts and nobles of his realm. The same scene was rehearsed that was a few years later to be seen at Constantinople when the widowed Theophilus took his second wife. Among the crowd of ladies presented before him, the eye of Lewis fixed upon Judith, a noble damsel from the Suabian Alps, daughter of Welf, count of Altdorf. Pressed hard by his courtiers he consented to take her to wife, and rued it all his remaining years. Judith was fair, wise, witty, and learned above all the women of her day, and soon acquired an