"And what was their crime?" you asked me.
"The crime of the father and of his son was to have tried to escape from bondage, so as not to be forced to cultivate under a master's whip, with the slave's collar on their necks and chains to their feet, the fields that were their own patrimony. They wished to escape cultivating those fields for the benefit of the Romans who had robbed them of them."
My answer astonished you still more, my child—you who always lived happy and free, who until now have known no other grief than that of the loss of your dear mother, of whom you have preserved only a vague memory. You were barely four years and two months old a short time after the victory that Gaul won over the Franks on the border of the Rhine.
You will remember that I broke off our conversation, and that I relapsed into one of those fits of melancholy that I find it impossible to overcome every time I recall the terrible domestic catastrophes that befell us on the Rhine. But I always regain courage when I remember the duty imposed upon me by our ancestor Joel, who lived nearly three hundred years ago in the same place where we are now again established after our family's having experienced innumerable vicissitudes.
When you will be old enough to read these pages, my son, you will understand the cause of these mortal fits of sadness in which you have often seen me steeped, despite your second mother's tenderness, whom I could not cherish too dearly. Yes, when you will have read the last and solemn words of Victoria, the Mother of the Camps, dreadful words, you will then understand that, however painful may be to me the past that will throw a shadow over my path until death, the future that is perhaps in store for Gaul by the mysterious will of Hesus, must fill me with still greater anguish—and you will share my anguish, my son, when you reflect over the wise and profound observation of our ancestor Sylvest:
"Alas, every time the nation is wounded the family bleeds."
Aye, if Victoria was endowed with the science of foreseeing the future, as so many of our venerable female druids have been before her; if ever her redoubtable prophecies are verified—then, woe is Gaul! Woe is our race! Woe is our family! A longer period of even more cruel sufferings will lie before our country under the yoke of the Rome of the Bishops than it experienced under the yoke of the Rome of the Caesars and the Emperors!
As I said before, I now resume the thread of my narrative where I dropped it several years ago.
After an extensive conversation on the events of the day, Victorin and his mother returned to Mayence, where they arrived late in the evening. Pretending great fatigue and some pain from the light wound that he received, the young general retired. The moment he reached his house he threw off his armor, and wrapping himself in his cloak repaired to the Bohemian girls.
"That woman will be fatal to you," were my words to the young general on our way from the battle field. Alas! My foresight was destined to prove true. By the way of these creatures, keep in mind, my son, a circumstance with which I later became acquainted; you will presently appreciate its importance—those Bohemian girls came to Mayence two days after the arrival of Tetrik in the same town, and they arrived from Gascony, the department that he governed.