Excommunication was at that time a terrible penalty, for it was sanctioned by universal belief, and it produced phenomena which awed the crowd, being mysterious effects of the magnetic current of condemnation. There is the example of Robert the Pious, who, having incurred this terrible penalty by an unlawful marriage, became the father of a monstrous child, similar to those effigies of demons which mediæval art represented in such ridiculous aspects of deformity. The melancholy fruit of a forbidden union bore witness at least to the tortured conscience and frightful dreams by which the mother was possessed. Robert accepted the event as a proof of the wrath of God and submitted to the papal judgment. Renouncing a marriage which the Church declared incestuous, he repudiated Bertha to espouse Constance of Provence, and it remained for him to recognise in the questionable morals and arrogant character of his new bride a second chastisement of heaven. The makers of chronicles at the period were enamoured of diabolical legends, but their records exhibit more of credulity than of good taste. Every monkish malady, every unhealthy nightmare of nuns, is looked upon as a case of veridic apparition. The result is repellent phantasmagoria, stupid allocutions, impossible transfigurations, to which the artistic spirit of Cyrano de Bergerac is the one thing wanting to render them entertaining creations. From the reign of Robert to that of St. Louis there is nothing, however, which seems to deserve recounting.[183]