CLOTILDA OF BURGANDY:
THE GIRL OF THE FRENCH VINYARDS
[Afterward known as "St. Clotilda," the first Queen of France.]
A.D. 485.
It was little more than fourteen hundred years ago, in the year
of our Lord 485, that a little girl crouched trembling and
terrified, at the feet of a pitying priest in the palace of the
kings of Burgundy. There has been many a sad little maid of ten,
before and since the days of the fair-haired Princess Clotilda,
but surely none had greater cause for terror and tears than she.
For her cruel uncle, Gundebald, waging war against his brother
Chilperic, the rightful king of Burgundy, had with a band of
savage followers burst into his brother's palace and, after the
fierce and relentless fashion of those cruel days, had murdered
King Chilperic, the father of little Clotilda, the queen, her
mother, and the young princes, her brothers; and was now
searching for her and her sister Sedelenda, to kill them also.
Poor Sedelenda had hidden away in some other far-off corner; but
even as Clotilda hung for protection to the robe of the good
stranger-priest Ugo of Rheims (whom the king, her father, had
lodged in the palace, on his homeward journey from Jerusalem),
the clash of steel drew nearer and nearer.
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