ever end until her vengeance was complete.
At last she wore out his courage and his strength alike, and the
inquiry gradually faded away before the persistent and sinister
vindictiveness of the royal witch at Rueil. She soon was strong enough
to put her creature Melantius back in his episcopal chair, and he was
content to officiate upon the very stones that were still stained with
the innocent blood of Pretextatus.

One more proof of the absolute mastery her intrigues had given her was
afforded by Fredegond's next action. Its heartless cynicism was but a
natural consequence of so much previous guilt. For she deliberately
summoned before her the slave whose assassin's knife she had bought,
reproached him openly with his hideous crime, and handed him over to
the dead bishop's relations. Under torture this miserable wretch
confessed the full details of the murder, the names of his
accomplices, and the guilt of Fredegond. The nephew of Pretextatus,
apparently aware that he would never get satisfaction on the
principals, leapt upon the prey that had so contemptuously been flung
to him, and cut the slave to pieces with his sword. And this was the
sole reparation that was ever given for the murder of the bishop. But
the people never forgot the Pretextatus who lived for centuries in
their memory as a martyred saint. His terrible fate has more than
atoned, in their eyes, for the impolitic events of his earlier life,
or his unwise affection for the unfortunate prince he had baptised.

[Illustration: THE ARMS OF ROUEN]

With this last crime that part of the Merovingian tragedy with which
Rouen is connected comes to a close. Nor have I space here to follow
out the actors to the curtain's fall. In other pages their various
fortunes and their dark calamities may be followed to a conclusion.
The next chapter in the history of the town is that of the Northmen,
and of the founding of that mighty dynasty which was to spread its
rule across the Channel, and to gather the towns of England under the
same sceptre that swayed the citizens of Rouen. But before the coming
of the Northmen, there are a few more slight facts that I must
chronicle if only to explain the desert and the ruins that alone were
Rouen when the first pirate galley swept up to the quay and anchored
close to where the western door of the Cathedral now looks out across
the Parvis.

The monk Fridegode relates that it was in 533 that the first stones of
what was afterward