It spreads on all sides that Morvan is dead; and the Franks come thronging to the scene of the encounter.  There is picked up and passed from hand to hand a head all bloody and fearfully disfigured.  Ditcar the monk is called to see it, and to say whether it is that of Morvan; but he has to wash the mass of disfigurement, and to partially adjust the hair, before he can pronounce that it is really Morvan’s.  There is then no more doubt; resistance is now impossible; the widow, the family, and the servants of Morvan arrive, are brought before Louis the Debonnair, accept all the conditions imposed upon them, and the Franks withdraw with the boast that Brittany is henceforth their tributary. (Faits et testes de Louis le Picux, a poem by Ermold le Noir, in M. Guizot’s Collection des Memoires relatifs L’Histoire de France, t. iv., p. 1-113.—­Fauriel, Histoire de la Gaule, etc., t. iv., p. 77-88.)

[Illustration:  Ditcar the Monk recognizing the Head of Morvan——­273]

On arriving at Angers, Louis found the Empress Hermengarde dying; and two days afterwards she was dead.  He had a tender heart, which was not proof against sorrow; and he testified a desire to abdicate and turn monk.  But he was dissuaded from his purpose; for it was easy to influence his resolutions.  A little later, he was advised to marry again, and he yielded.  Several princesses were introduced; and he chose Judith of Bavaria, daughter of Count Welf (Guelf), a family already powerful and in later times celebrated.  Judith was young, beautiful, witty, ambitious, and skilled in the art of making the gift of pleasing subserve the passion for ruling.  Louis, during his expedition into Brittany, had just witnessed the fatal result of a woman’s empire over her husband; he was destined himself to offer a more striking and more long-lived example of it.  In 823, he had, by his new empress Judith, a son, whom he called Charles, and who was hereafter to be known as Charles the Bald.  This son became his mother’s ruling, if not exclusive, passion, and the source of his father’s woes.  His birth could not fail to cause ill-temper and mistrust in Louis’s three sons by Hermengarde, who were already kings.  They had but a short time previously received the first proof of their father’s weakness.  In 822, Louis, repenting of his severity towards his nephew, Bernard of Italy, whose eyes he had caused to be put out as a punishment for rebellion, and who had died in consequence, considered himself bound to perform at Attigny, in the church and before the people, a solemn act of penance; which was creditable to his honesty and piety, but the details left upon the minds of the beholders an impression unfavorable to the emperor’s dignity and authority.  In 829, during an assembly held at Worms, he, yielding to his wife’s entreaties and doubtless also to his own yearnings towards his youngest son, set at nought the solemn act whereby, in 817, he had shared