Marriage is a civil act, which from its nature can be subject only to the regulations of the civil law. The religious rules or maxims which relate to it have no exterior force, no absolute efficacy, but inasmuch as they are inserted into the national code: they are not so inserted in those of the 9th century, and, consequently, the ecclesiastical ministry should have confined itself to recommending, in secret and without scandal, the observance, purely voluntary, of these maxims. But this wisdom, though so natural, was already foreign to the manners of a clergy, whose ministry the False Decretals had erected into authority; and neither kings nor people were capable of that degree of attention, necessary to acquire specific ideas of their civil rights and their religious duties. While Lothaire continued the husband of Theutberga, and had Valdrade but as a concubine, the pope and the bishops abstained from requiring him to give an example of a more regular and decent life: but from the time he thought of conferring upon Valdrade the rights of a lawful wife, Nicholas was earnest to apply to this project of reform the pontifical veto. In truth, Lothaire himself provoked the intervention of the clergy, by causing Theutberga to appear before a tribunal of bishops, in order to undergo their indelicate interrogatories. Twice she confessed herself guilty of incest; and when the office of these Lorraine priests extended itself to extorting from her public avowals of the same, Nicholas whom they acknowledged as their supreme head, might consider himself authorised to revise so strong a proceeding. He therefore annulled the decision pronounced against Theutberga by the councils of Aix-la-Chapelle and of Metz; he degraded two prelates, Gonthier and Theutgaud, whom the latter of these councils had thought proper to depute to him. These prelates condemned in plain terms the Pope’s sentence; they asserted, that Nicholas wished to make himself monarch of the world.⁸⁵ The Emperor Louis seemed to believe so in part; he came to Rome resolved to support his brother Lothaire again at Nicholas. But a fast and processions ordained by the pope, a tumult which he did not prevent, profanations about which he made a great noise, the sudden death of a soldier accused of having mutilated a miraculous cross; so many unlucky omens terrified Louis to that degree that it threw him into a fever. Furthermore, while Louis had been endeavouring to protect Lothaire, Charles the Bald, having declared against the latter, had received Theutberga. Hincmar himself composed a treatise respecting this divorce, which occupied all Europe, far from favourable to the interests of Valdiade.⁸⁶