"Well, my son," said Marik Lebrenn to Sacrovir, "in teaching you the Breton tongue I had above all in mind—obedient, moreover, to a tradition in our family, according to which it never forgot its mother tongue—to enable you to read these manuscripts."
"Are they, then, written in the Breton tongue, father?" asked Velleda.
"Yes, my children. The Breton tongue is none other than the Celtic or Gallic that was once spoken all over Gaul before the Roman and Frankish conquests. With the exception of a few changes that have taken place in the course of the centuries, it has preserved its purity in our Brittany, down to our own days. Of all the provinces of Gaul, Brittany was the last to submit to the Frankish Kings who issued from the conquest. Yes, let us never forget the proud and heroic motto of our fathers, conquered and despoiled though they were by the invader: We still preserve our name, our tongue, our faith. Now, then, my children, after two thousand years of struggles and strifes, our family has preserved its name, its tongue and its faith. We call ourselves Lebrenn, we speak Gallic, and I have raised you in the faith of our fathers, in the faith of the immortality of the soul and of the continuity of existence which enables us to look upon death as a change of habitation, nothing more—a sublime faith the morality of which, taught by the druids, was summed up in precepts like these: Adore God; do no harm; exercise charity; he is pure and holy who performs celestial works and pure. Fortunately, my children, we are not the only ones who preserved the sublime dogma of the continuity of life. Armand Barbès, one of the bravest militants of the democracy, when taken prisoner and subsequently condemned to death under the reign of Louis Philippe, awaited the hour of his execution with religious serenity of soul. The serenity which he preserved he drew from his faith in the perpetuity of life, a fundamental principle in our creed. I can do no better, my friends, than to read to you a page from the writings of Armand Barbès, the page which he dedicated to the memory of Godefroid Cavaignac, the publicist of the democracy, entitled: 'Two days of a death sentence.'"
Lebrenn read:
"It was the 12th of June, 1839. After four days' deliberation the Court of Peers notified me of its sentence. According to the usage in such cases, it was the registrar who brought me the sentence, and the honorable Cauchy thought it his duty to add to his message a little puff for the Roman Catholic and Apostolic religion. I answered him that I had my own religion and believed in God, but that that was no reason why I should be in need of the consolations of a priest, whosoever he might be. I requested him to be kind enough to inform his masters that I was ready to die, and that I only hoped that when their last hour approached their soul might be as tranquil as mine.
"Armand Barbès then proceeds to tell how, instinctively inspired, and led by the approach of his last hour to a plane of lofty thought, he recalled with thrilling gratitude the source from which he drew his supreme tranquility in the face of death. He then says further:
"One day I read in the New Encyclopedia the superb article on Heaven by John Raynaud. Passing by the irrefutable arguments with which he incidentally demolishes the heaven and hell of the Catholics, his leading thought, as taught by the druid faith, of deriving from the law of progress the infinite series of our lives, as they continuously progress in worlds that gravitate ever nearer and nearer to God, seemed to me to satisfy at once all our multiple aspirations. Do not the moral sense, the imagination, do not our desires, does not everything find there its place? Nevertheless, carried away, while I read the article, by the pre-occupations of an active republican, I gave at the time little thought to details; all I did with these was to deposit them, so to speak, undigested in my heart. But later, when picked up wounded on the street I inhabited a prison cell with the scaffold in perspective, I drew them out of the place where I held them in reserve as a last store of wealth the value of which the time had come for me to appreciate in full—and these thoughts rose naturally to my mind during my watches, already a victim bound for the executioner, during these solitary hours when I kept watch in the solemn night of death.
"I beg pardon of John Raynaud, the elegant encyclopedist, for my having turned into a vile plummet, in order to meet the exigency of the moment, the pure gold of his philosophy. Thus, after confirming with some preliminary reasoning my belief in the immortality of the soul, meseems a sublime Jacob's ladder unrolled before my eyes, with its foot resting on the earth to climb heavenward, eternally, from star to star, from sphere to sphere! The cart, this planet upon which I had spent thirty years, looked to me to be one of the innumerable specks where man makes his first landing in life—whence he begins to climb upwards before God, and, when the phenomenon which we call death is accomplished, man, drawn by the attraction of progress, is forthwith re-born in a superior star with a new expansion of his being.
"So you see, my children, what fortitude of soul the dogma of the perpetuity of life is able to impart. Let us, then, follow the example of our forefathers; let us follow in the footsteps of their belief; and let us, like them, preserve our name, our tongue and our faith."
"We shall not fail in that pledge, father," answered Velleda.