His four sons, when among them was divided the Prankish realm, soon found a pretext to wage a religious war against the Arian Burgundians. Their king, Sigismund, after the death of his first wife, Ostrogotha, a daughter of the great Theodoric, took a second wife who, like a real stepmother, ill-treated the young son of the king. When the youth once bitterly reproached his stepmother for wearing the garments and jewels of his mother, the wicked woman persuaded the king that his son aspired to his throne. She attained her purpose: the youth was murdered. But Nemesis soon overtook the murderer of his son: he lost his throne and his life in battle against the Franks. Besides Clotilde, the pious wife of Clovis, we meet, among the many women of terrible moral depravity, with another saintly woman in the Prankish dynasty. Chlotar, the youngest of Clevis's four sons, after having conquered the Thuringians, though he had numberless wives and concubines, took Radegundis, the daughter of the defeated Hermanfrid, for a wife. But the saintly woman shrank from the touch of the immoral king, and threw herself on the icy stone pavement, unmindful of the pain it gave her body, for her soul was filled with the agitation of ardent religious passion, and spent her time in prayer and devotion. When she returned to the bridal chamber, neither the heat of the fire, nor the impure royal bed could restore the natural heat of her body; and the king declared that he possessed rather a nun than a wife. Radegundis succeeded in obtaining a divorce from Chlotar and retired to a cloister, where she obtained the dignity of a deaconess, an honor which canonical regulations reserved only to virgins. In the cloister founded by her in the neighborhood of Poitiers, Radegundis introduced a very strict discipline, she enriched the house with precious relics, and passed the rest of her life in pious devotions and expiations for the sins of Chlotar, who was sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of moral corruption. A story is told by Gregory of Tours concerning Ingundis, one of the concubines of Chlotar, the pious bishop calls her _uxor_ (wife), however, which is worth repeating. Ingundis, in the full possession of the love of Chlotar, begged of him to secure a worthy husband for her sister Aregundia, and expatiated on the physical qualities and moral virtues of her sister. Chlotar betook himself to her country residence, and as she pleased him well he married her. Then he returned to Ingundis and informed her that he had given her sister the best man he could find in the realm of the Franks, namely, himself. With bitter disappointment in her heart, she, according to the statement of the chronicler, meekly submitted, saying: "What may seem good in the eyes of my lord, he may do; only may thy maid live in the grace of the king."