One can imagine that, to a nature as devout as Robert's, such a curse was almost overwhelming. Yet he and Bertha endured for some time the horrors which this excommunication brought upon them, and Robert resisted with far more spirit than one would have supposed him to possess. The curse fell upon France, and upon its king and queen, who were surely no more morally guilty than their unfortunate subjects. Awful were the effects of the curse, according to Petrus Damianus, who records with pious unction most of the signs and wonders with which the age was filled. All save a few of the lowest servants fled from the accursed presence of Robert and his queen, and even these menials, when they had prepared the king's food, deemed the very vessels from which he had eaten polluted by his touch, and purified them by fire or destroyed them. Bertha was reported to be a foul witch, and to have the foot of a goose, and was nicknamed _la reine pedauque_, or _pied d'oie_ (Queen Goose-foot). In her agitation and misery, the child she should have borne was prematurely brought forth. The charitable Damianus tells us that it was currently reported to be of monstrous form, having the head and neck of a swan and not of a human being. Whether these horrors were direct effects of God's wrath or had birth in the zealous imagination of a writer whose interest it was to lay on the colors in his description of the blasting effects of excommunication, Robert and Bertha had to resign themselves to the cruel separation. Robert's superstitious fears were worked on by his monkish advisers, particularly Abbo, Abbot of Fleury, "who incessantly reprimanded the king, in public and in, private." This holy man, says the biographer of Robert, "continued his reproaches until the good King acknowledged his fault and abandoned the wife whom it was not permitted him to possess." The separation seems to have taken place definitely about the year 1006, and Robert was to be miserable in his domestic life all the rest of his days.