"Yes, father—we swear!"
"Well, then, Sacrovir, this day on which you have completed your twenty-first year, you are free, agreeable to our traditions, to read these manuscripts. We shall begin the reading this very evening, in a family circle, and continue it from day to day. In order that George may participate, we shall translate into French, as we read."
Marik Lebrenn, his wife and George being gathered together that evening, Sacrovir Lebrenn began the readings, starting with the first manuscript, entitled: "The Gold Sickle."
EPILOGUE
I request my reader to leap over the space of time that elapsed since we left the family of Lebrenn assembled in the room, held to be so mysterious by Gildas, and which contained the archives or narratives of the family, which they began to read successively.
It is now Sunday, December 1, 1851. The same personages—Marik Lebrenn, Henory his wife, Sacrovir, his sister Velleda, and her husband—are assembled on the evening of that Sunday in the modest upper parlor connected with the linendraper's shop.
Answering a question put to him by his father, Sacrovir was saying:
"The prophecy came very near being fulfilled in 1848. The thrones shook everywhere—revolutions in Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Rome. Italy was on fire. The German Confederation contemplated declaring itself a republican federation at the diet of Frankfort. Frankfort was in revolt; Hungary up in arms; Poland and Spain shook to their very center; all Europe was in a revolutionary ferment, Russia alone excepted. What, however, could that country's autocrat do against the confederation of all the other peoples, leagued against him in a holy, the holiest of alliances! One more step, and our generation would have hailed the United States of Europe. Alas! The sublime moment was missed! The plan miscarried. Will it be long before the opportunity returns?"
"What does it matter, my children," replied Lebrenn, "whether we actually witness or not the dawn, if we have the certainty that the sun of that beautiful day is bound eventually to shine over a regenerated world! The very disappointment of 1848 is a positive earnest that the prophecy of our ancestress Victoria the Great will be accomplished. Do you for a moment imagine that the lava is cold which, in 1848, ran boiling over such wide areas of Europe? No! No! Whatever appearances may be, whatever the present depression, revolutionary thought is at this very hour germinating under the soil. It is spreading and gaining in depth through a thousand underground rootlets. Sooner or later, its sudden and last irresistible explosion will be heard. Upon the ruins of the old social system a new social order will be established.
"There can be no doubt whatever, my children, regarding that great and crowning event. Progress is the law of humanity—for society as well as for the individual. Our plebeian narratives furnish the irrefutable proof. Our ancestors, subjected, first by the Roman and then by the Frankish conquest, to a most galling slavery, progressed by little and little towards freedom. Originally slaves and sold and exploited and treated like vile human cattle, they then became serfs, and, from serfs, vassals. Finally they revindicated and conquered their sovereignty, consecrated by the immortal Republic of 1792, and confirmed by that of 1848. When we see such progress traced across the pages of the centuries, how can we entertain any doubts as to what the future has in store?"