Eginhard himself did not escape suspicion, though his amour with fair Emma, and the romantic story of their nightly meetings and Emma's carrying her learned lover through the freshly fallen snow to conceal his footprint must be assigned to the domain of unauthenticated legend. But it is a historical fact that several of Charlemagne's daughters had illegitimate children. Being debarred from marriage they sought unlawful love adventures. The oldest, Hruodrud, who had been several years betrothed to the Greek emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitos, until her father dissolved the betrothal, left a son by Count Rorich. Bertha's two sons, Hartnid and Nidhard, the latter a brave warrior and a famous chronicler, owed their existence to Angilbert, the court poet and historian who was afterward Abbot of Centulum. Especially after the death of Charlemagne were the lives of his daughters so shameful that King Ludwig, the German, saw himself forced to remove some of the most scandalously behaving lords from the suite of the princely sinners. In spite of those moral shortcomings, Princess Bertha was especially brilliant as a scholar. She was called Delia, sister of Apollo, in Charlemagne's "Academy." She sang her teacher Alcuin's poems, which she accompanied by string music. Besides the emperor's wife and his daughters, there were two nuns in the academic circle: the elder, Gisela, Charlemagne's sister, surnamed Lucia, Alcuin's best friend, and her intimate, Riktrudis, with the academic name of Columba; also Gundrada, of illustrious nobility and charm, the sole secular lady at the court against whom no word of gossip was ever uttered by courtiers or clerics.