It was a clear, bright evening in the spring of 1334, and the setting sun was pouring a flood of golden glory over the wooded ridges, and dark moors, and wide green meadows, and quaint little villages of Bretagne, or Brittany, then a semi-independent principality ruled by its own duke, and little foreseeing that, barely two centuries later, it was to be united to France once for all.
Over earth and sky brooded a deep, dreamy stillness of perfect repose, broken only by the lowing of cattle from the distant pastures, and the soft, sweet chime of the vesper-bell from the unseen church tower, hidden by the still uncleared wood, through one solitary gap in which were seen the massive grey battlements of Motte-Brun Castle, the residence of the local “seigneur,” or lord of the manor. A rabbit sat upright in its burrow to clean its furry face. A squirrel, halfway up the pillar-like stem of a tall tree, paused a moment to look down with its small, bright, restless eye; and a tiny bird, perched on a bough above, broke forth in a blithe carol.
But the soothing influence of this universal peace brought no calm to the excited lad who was striding up and down a small open space in the heart of the wood, stamping fiercely ever and anon, and muttering, half aloud, words that seemed less like any connected utterance than like the almost unconscious bursting forth of thoughts too torturing to be controlled.
“Is it my blame that I was born thus ill-favoured? Yet mine own father and mother gloom upon me and shrink away from me as from one under ban of holy Church, or taken red-handed in mortal sin. What have I done that mine own kith and kin should deal with me as with a leper?”
In calling himself ill-favoured, the poor boy had only spoken the truth; for the features lighted up by the sinking sun, as he turned his face toward it, were hideous enough for one of the demons with which these woods were still peopled by native superstition.
His head was unnaturally large, and covered with coarse, black, bristly hair, which, worn long according to the custom of all men of good birth in that age, tossed loosely over his huge round shoulders like a bison’s mane. His light-green eyes, small and fierce as those of a snake, looked out from beneath a low, slanting forehead garnished with bushy black eyebrows, which were bent just then in a frown as dark as a thunder-cloud. His nose was so flat that it almost seemed to turn inward, and its wide nostrils gaped like the yawning gargoyles of a cathedral. His large, coarse mouth, the heavy jaw of which was worthy of a bulldog, was filled with strong, sharp teeth, which, as he gnashed them in a burst of rage, sent a sudden flash of white across his swarthy face like lightning in a moonless sky.
His figure was quite as strange as his face. Low of stature and clumsily built, his vast and almost unnatural breadth of shoulder and depth of chest gave him the squat, dwarfish form assigned by popular belief to the deformed “Dwergar” (earth-dwarfs) who then figured prominently in the legends of all Western Europe. His length of arm was so great that his hands reached below his knees, while his lower limbs seemed as much too short as his arms were too long. In a word, had a half-grown black bear been set on its hind legs, and arrayed in the rich dress of a fourteenth-century noble, it would have looked just like this strange boy.
All at once the excited lad stopped short in his restless pacing, and, as if feeling the need of venting in some violent bodily exertion the frenzy that boiled within him, snatched from its sheath his only weapon (a broad-bladed hunting-knife, half cutlass and half dirk), and with one slash cut half through the thickest part of a large bough just over his head.
His arm was raised to repeat the blow and sever the branch entirely, when a new thought struck him, and, flinging down his weapon, he seized the bough with both hands, and threw his whole strength into a tug that seemed capable of dislodging not merely the branch, but the tree itself.
The tough wood quivered, cracked, and gave way, and a second effort—which hung the boy-athlete’s low, broad forehead with beads of moisture, and made the veins of his strong hands stand out like cords—wrenched the bough away altogether.