the fruits of the royal irregularities.  In 614, after thirty-nine years of wars, plots, murders, and political and personal vicissitudes, from the death of her husband Sigebert I., and under the reigns of her son Theodebert, and her grandsons Theodebert II. and Thierry II., Queen Brunehaut, at the age of eighty years, fell into the hands of her mortal enemy, Clotaire II., son of Fredegonde, now sole king of the Franks.  After having grossly insulted her, he had her paraded, seated on a camel, in front of his whole army, and then ordered her to be tied by the hair, one foot, and one arm to the tail of an unbroken horse, that carried her away, and dashed her in pieces as he galloped and kicked, beneath the eyes of the ferocious spectators.

[Illustration:  The Execution of Brunehaut——­175]

After the execution of Brunehaut and the death of Clotaire II., the history of the Franks becomes a little less dark and less bloody.  Not that murders and great irregularities, in the court and amongst the people, disappear altogether.  Dagobert I., for instance, the successor of Clotaire II., and grandson of Chilperic and Fredegonde, had no scruple, under the pressure of self-interest, in committing an iniquitous and barbarous act.  After having consented to leave to his younger brother Charibert the kingdom of Aquitania, he retook it by force in 631, at the death of Charibert, seizing at the same time his treasures, and causing or permitting to be murdered his young nephew Chilperic, rightful heir of his father.  About the same time Dagobert had assigned amongst the Bavarians, subjects of his beyond the Rhine, an asylum to nine thousand Bulgarians, who had been driven with their wives and children from Pannonia.  Not knowing, afterwards, where to put or how to feed these refugees, he ordered them all to be massacred in one night; and scarcely seven hundred of them succeeded in escaping by flight.  The private morals of Dagobert were not more scrupulous than his public acts.  “A slave to incontinence as King Solomon was,” says his biographer Fredegaire, “he had three queens and a host of concubines.”  Given up to extravagance and pomp, it pleased him to imitate the magnificence of the imperial court at Constantinople, and at one time he laid hands for that purpose, upon the possessions of certain of his “leudes” or of certain churches; at another he gave to his favorite church, the Abbey of St. Denis, “so many precious stones, articles of value, and domains in various places, that all the world,” says Fredegaire, “was stricken with admiration.”  But, despite of these excesses and scandals, Dagobert was the most wisely energetic, the least cruel in feeling, the most prudent in enterprise, and the most capable of governing with some little regularity and effectiveness, of all the kings furnished, since Clovis, by the Merovingian race.  He had, on ascending the throne, this immense advantage, that the three Frankish dominions, Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy