"A knowledge of the past," observed George Duchene, "imparts a firm faith in the future."
"How strange the emotions that come over one," remarked Velleda, "when the long procession of the personages of our ancient family files before our mind's eye in the living flesh, I may say, as if they emerged from the dust of the ages! Hena, the virgin of the Isle of Sen; Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak; Sylvest, the Roman slave, and his sister Syomara; then Genevieve, who witnessed the execution of Jesus of Nazareth; Schanvoch, the soldier and foster-brother of Victoria the Great; then Ronan the Vagre, the intrepid insurgent against the Frankish conquest; Loysik the hermit laborer, who saw Brunhild die; Amael, Charles Martel's companion in arms, and appointed keeper of the last pitiful scion of the once redoubtable Clovis; Vortigern, the beloved of Thetralde, Charlemagne's daughter; Eidiol, the Parisian skipper, besides Gaëlo the Pirate and ancestor of the Prince of Gerolstein and companion in arms of Rolf, who became Duke of Normandy and son-in-law of the French King Charles the Simple; Yvon the Forester, an eye-witness of the death of Louis the Do-Nothing, the last scion of the Carlovingian dynasty, succeeded by Hugh Capet who enthroned his house with the aid of adultery and murder; Fergan the Quarryman, serf of the seigneur of Plouernel, and who, departing for Palestine, was present at the siege and capture of Jerusalem. His son Colombaik, one of the bold communiers of the city of Laon, who battled against their episcopal seigneur in the endeavor to emancipate the communes from the feudal yoke; Karvel the Perfect, done to death with his sweet wife Morise during the Crusade against the Albigensians; Mazurec the Lambkin, the husband of Aveline-Who-Never-Lied, daughter of William Caillet, the immortal chieftain of the Jacques; Jocelyn the Champion who witnessed the martyrdom of Joan Darc, the Maid of Gaul; Christian the Printer, whose daughter Hena was burned alive before Francis I; Antonicq, who battled intrepidly at the siege of La Rochelle by the side of Cornelia Mirant, his brave bride-to-be; Salaun, the mariner, one of the chiefs in the revolt of the vassals of Brittany who endeavored to impose the Peasant Code upon their seigneurs and bishops during the reign of Louis XIV. Finally, John Lebrenn, our own grandfather, whose sister Victoria was the victim of the lewdness of Louis XV—that John Lebrenn, who was commissioned as a guard over Louis XVI, but who, alas! did not live to hail the Republic of 1848! When so many members of our race and our blood rise before my mind from the vasty depths of the centuries that have rolled by, a vertigo seizes me as I climb the ladder from Age to Age up to the fountainhead of our family, in the days of the Republic of the Gauls."
Velleda's words were listened to with rapt attention by all the members of her family. Her father was the first to break the silence:
"My children, if indeed our family history is priceless, the reason lies in that that history is the history, not of a family merely, but, above all, of all the proletarians and all the bourgeois of Gallic extraction, of that Gallic race that was conquered and subjugated by the Franks, the dominant race, until 1789, the date of their final emancipation. The struggle of the Children of Joel across the ages with the Children of Neroweg, of whom the Count of Plouernel is a descendant, is a summary of the centuries-old struggle between the vanquishers and the vanquished, the oppressors and the oppressed. By imparting to us a knowledge and the consciousness of what our forefathers have undergone in order to regain their freedom and their rights, this history must render us all the prouder and more jealous of the boon that we have conquered at the cost of so many tears, of such untold privations, and of such torrents of blood. It must inspire us with the desire to defend it unto death."
THE END.
Changes made in the text (note of etext transcriber):
I know a fine man=>I knew a fine man
George's counteance=>George's countenance
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "If the Gallic tongue has been in some part preserved by the bards, and by bards in possession of the druidic traditions, that could only have taken place in Armorica, that province which for so many centuries formed an independent state, and which, in spite of its annexation to France, has remained Gallic in physiognomy, in costume, and in language, down to our own day."—Ampere, History of Literature.
[2] Villemarqué, in his excellent Popular Songs of Brittany, assigns this ballad, which is still heard among the strolling ballad-singers of that province, to the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Century.