"Tetrik, the Chief of Gaul, is in his death agony—he is dying of poison."
Indeed Tetrik was, or rather seemed to have been, poisoned at the same time as Victoria. He had hardly stepped into the house of the general of the army, when he seemed seized with severe pangs. When two weeks later I myself returned to life, the life of Tetrik was still despaired of.
I must admit I was stupefied at the strange information; my reason refused to believe the man guilty of a crime of which he was himself a victim.
Victoria's death threw the city of Treves, the army, and later the whole nation into consternation. The funeral of the august Mother of the Camps seemed to be the funeral of Gaul herself. In her sudden taking-off people saw the presage of new evils to the country. The Gallic senate decreed the apotheosis of Victoria. It was celebrated at Treves in the midst of universal sorrow and tears. The pompous solemnity of the druid cult, the chant of the bards, imparted imposing splendor to the ceremony. Embalmed and lying on an ivory couch covered with cloth of gold, Victoria lay in state to the veneration of the citizens who crowded in mass to the house of mourning. The place was constantly invaded by that army of the Rhine of which Victoria was truly the mother. Finally her remains were placed upon the pyre, agreeable to the custom of our fathers. Incense rose along the streets of Treves, crossed by the funeral procession, which was headed by the bards singing on their golden harps the praises of the illustrious woman. The pyre was then set on fire and disappeared in a sheet of flame.
A medal, struck on the very day of the funeral ceremony, represents, on its obverse, the head of the Gallic heroine, casqued as Minerva, and on its reverse, an eagle with outstretched wings flying into space with its eyes fixed upon the sun, the symbol of the druid faith—the soul leaving this world and flying towards the unknown world where it is to be clad in a new body. Under the symbol the ordinary formula was engraved: "Consecration," followed below by these words:
Victoria, Emperor.
By that virile appellation Gaul immortalized in her enthusiasm the glorious Mother of the Camps, and wreathed her memory in a title that she had steadily declined during life—a life that was at once modest and sublime, and wholly consecrated to her father, her husband, her son and to the glory and welfare of her country.
My perplexity was profound. The poisoning of Tetrik, who, as it was claimed, still struggled with death, the disappearance of the parchments that contained the traitor's conversation with Victoria, and which she was thereby prevented from signing before dying—all these circumstances rendered the prosecution of the traitor difficult, if not impossible. An accusation lodged by me, an obscure soldier, against Tetrik, who survived as the supreme Chief of Gaul, and whose power was now all the greater, seeing it was no longer counterbalanced by the vast influence of the Mother of the Camps, could not lead to favorable results. Before deciding upon a final course in the matter, I waited for my shattered frame and mind to recover their former vigor.
Three days after Victoria's death, and obedient to the last wishes of the Mother of the Camps, Sampso opened the casket that Victoria gave her. In it my wife found a last touching proof of the thoughtfulness of my foster-sister. There was a parchment with these words inscribed in her own hand:
"We shall never part until death," did we, my good brother Schanvoch, often say to each other; it is your wish, it is mine; but if I am called away before you to live in the unknown worlds, where we shall one day meet again, I shall feel happy on the day when we shall meet again elsewhere than here, at the thought that you have gone back to Brittany, the cradle of your family.