magne, who established himself there and built a church and a palace near the resting place of the charmed stone.
A somewhat different version of this tale is given by Petrarch,27
who states that he had it from the priests of Aix-la-Chapelle. There is
here no mention of a serpent bringing a stone, and the object of
Charlemagne's love is not his wife but a woman who possesses a magic
ring. The emperor is so thoroughly infatuated that when she dies he has
the body decked out with gorgeous apparel, adorns it with precious
stones and refuses to leave it. Anxious to relieve his sovereign from
this obsession, the Bishop of Cologne prays to God for a solution of
the mystery, and is told, in a vision, that the cause lies beneath the
tongue of the corpse. He searches in the place indicated and finds
there a gem set in a slender ring. When this is removed Charlemagne
regains his normal state, and gazes with surprise and horror upon the
object of his love. The story then proceeds in much the same way as in
the older German version.
The
remains of Charlemagne, and presumably whatever ornaments may have been
buried with him, were disinterred at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) in 1000,
by order of the German emperor Otto III. The bare fact of the discovery
of Charlemagne's bones is recorded in the early chronicle,28
but according to legends of a later time, when the imperial crypt was
opened, the emperor was to be seen seated on a marble throne and
adorned with imperial vesture and ornaments. Such had been his
persistent vitality that his finger-nails had continued to grow after
his death, and had pierced through the gloves on his hands.29
27 Petrarch«, Epistolarum libri, Lugduni, 1601, pp. 10, 11.
28 Annales Lamberti, in Monum. Germ., vol. iii, p. 91.
29 Monum. Germ. Script., vol. vii, p. 106.
