"I do not understand it," thought she; "after all, the young girl cannot be his daughter."
CHAPTER XXII.
IN BRETAGNE.
Our readers must now permit us to look backward, for we have (in following the principal persons of our history) neglected some others in Bretagne, who deserve some notice; besides, if we do not represent them as taking an active part in this tale, history is ready with her inflexible voice to contradict us; we must, therefore, for the present, submit to the exigencies of history.
Bretagne had, from the first, taken an active part in the movement of the legitimated bastards; this province, which had given pledges of fidelity to monarchical principles, and pushed them to exaggeration, if not to madness, since it preferred the adulterous offspring of a king to the interests of a kingdom, and since its love became a crime by calling in aid of the pretensions of those whom it recognized as its princes, enemies against whom Louis XIV. for sixty years, and France for two centuries had waged a war of extermination.
We have seen the list of the principal names which constituted this revolt; the regent had wittily said that it contained the head and tail; but he was mistaken—it was the head and body. The head was the council of the legitimated princes, the king of Spain, and his imbecile agent, the prince of Cellamare; the body was formed by those brave and clever men who were now in the Bastille; but the tail was now agitating in Bretagne among a people unaccustomed to the ways of a court, and it was a tail armed with stings like those of a scorpion, and which was the most to be feared.
The Bretagne chiefs, then, renewed the Chevalier de Rohan, under Louis XIV.; we say the Chevalier de Rohan, because to every conspiracy must be given the name of a chief.
Along with the prince, who was a conceited and commonplace man, and even before him, were two men, stronger than he; one in thought and the other in execution. These two men were Letreaumont, a Norman gentleman, and Affinius Vanden-Enden, a Dutch philosopher; Letreaumont wanted money, he was the arm; Affinius wanted a republic, he was the soul. This republic, moreover, he wanted inclosed in Louis XIV.'s kingdom, still further to annoy the great king—who hated republicans even at a distance—who had persecuted and destroyed the Pensioner of Holland, John de Witt, more cruel in this than the Prince of Orange, who, in declaring himself De Witt's enemy, revenged personal injuries, while Louis XIV. had received nothing but friendship and devotion from this great man.
Now Affinius wanted a republic in Normandy, and got the Chevalier de Rohan named Protector; the Bretons wished to revenge themselves for certain injuries their province had received under the regency, and they decreed it a republic, with the power of choosing a protector, even were he a Spaniard; but Monsieur de Maine had a good chance.
This is what passed in Bretagne.