delicate workmanship and its brilliancy of light and coloring, the aspiration toward the high and the beautiful which filled men’s desires after they came in contact with the appealing mysticism and the dazzling loveliness of the East. Like his father Henry had trouble with his wives--there were three of them--and the marital affairs of his son, Philip I (1060-1108), were even more involved. Becoming violently infatuated with Bertrade, the fourth wife of the Count of Anjou, Philip sent away his wife, Bertha, and arranged with Bertrade during a church service that she should submit to being kidnapped. No bishop would marry them and it was only after long search that a priest was found sufficiently timid or sufficiently avaricious to yield his conscience to the royal demand. Excommunication followed promptly, and for twelve years the coming of Philip and Bertrade to a city silenced the church bells, which rang out joyfully again as they left. So bad was the effect upon his people of their king’s obstinate wrong-doing that the pope at last consented to an examination of the royal offender. All the bishops of France met in Paris on the first day of December, 1104. The Bishop of Orleans and the Bishop of Paris waited upon Philip and asked whether he were prepared to change his manner of life. He said that he was and accordingly appeared before the ecclesiastical body barefooted and seemingly penitent. Kneeling he promised atonement and swore to put aside Bertrade. Bertrade took a similar oath. Neither of them kept it, but so willing was everybody to feign blindness after this form of expiation that two years later the monks of Saint Nicholas at Angers received them both cordially, and Bertrade’s discarded husband dined at the same table with his successor and slept in the same room with him. Philip never was a friend of the church though he did not in later life carry into effect depredations such as he planned when young, a real theft, in fact, which, through a miraculous intervention, never came to pass. Feeling a twinge of royal poverty--which does not mean that he was really very poor--he went with one of his officers to Saint Germain-des-Prés to take possession of some part of its riches. As they approached the treasury the king’s companion was stricken blind, a circumstance that put the thieving monarch to flight in terror. Yet the check was not lasting for he and his courtiers so corrupted some of the nunneries and monasteries of Paris that the Bishop of Paris was obliged to disperse the establishments. One of the largest, a convent, was on the Cité on the site of the present Prefecture of Police.