away, had taken her again. These censures
were taken off when she and the king had sworn upon the gospels, in the
council of Poitiers, never to live together again. Bertrade, when she
had retired to an estate which was her dower, in the diocese of
Chartres, was so powerfully moved by the exhortations of St. Robert,
that, renouncing the world, of which she had been long the idol, she
took the religious veil at Fontevraud, and led there an exemplary life
till her death. Many other princesses embraced the same state {460}
under the direction of the holy founder: among others Hersande of
Champagne, widow of William of Monsoreau; Agnes of Montroeil, of the
same family; Ermengarde, wife of Alin Fergan, duke of Brittany; {}pa,
countess of Thoulouse, wife of William IX., duke of Aquitaine, &c. After
the death of St. Robert, several queens and princesses had taken
sanctuary in this monastery, flying from the corruption of the world.
Among its abbesses are counted fourteen princesses, of which five were
of the royal house of Bourbon. The abbot Suger, writing to pope Eugenius
III., about fifty years after the death of the founder, says there were
at that time in this order between five and six thousand religious
persons. The order of Fontevraud, in France, is divided into four
provinces. B. Robert lived to see above three thousand nuns in this one
house. He died in 1116, on the 25th of February, St. Matthias's day, it
being leap-year, in the seventieth of his age, at the monastery of
Orsan, near Linieres, in Berry. His body was conveyed to Fontevraud, and
there interred. The bishop of Poitiers, in 1644, took a juridical
information of many miracles wrought by his intercession.[1] From the
time of his death he has been honored with the title of blessed, and is
invoked in the litany of his order, which keeps his festival only with a
mass of the Trinity on St. Matthias's day. See his life by Baldric,
bishop of Dole, his contemporary; Helyot, Hist. des Ordres Relig. t. 6,
p. 83, Dom Lobineau, Hist. de Bretagne, fol. 1707, p. 113, and, in the
first place, Chatelain, Notes on the Martyrol. p. 736 to 758, who
clearly confutes those who place his death in 1117.

Footnotes:
1. Some have raked up most groundless slanders to asperse the character
of this holy man, as, that he admitted all to the religious habit
that asked it, and was guilty of too familiar conversation with
women. These slanders were spread in a letter of Roscel