Accordingly, the wretched Jews of Gaul were persecuted and slaughtered at the order of the clergy because the Saracens of Judea destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem! As to the Manichæans of Orleans, another passage from the same chronicle expresses itself in these words:
"In 1017, the King and all his loyal subjects, seeing the folly of these miserable heretics of Orleans, caused a large pyre to be lighted near the town, in the hope that fear, produced by the sight, would overcome their stubbornness; but seeing that they persisted, thirteen of them were cast into the flames ... and all those that could not be convinced to abandon their perverse ways met the same fate, whereupon the venerable cult of the Catholic faith, having triumphed over the foolish presumption of its enemies, shone with all the greater luster on earth."
What with the wars that the ecclesiastical seigneurs plunged Gaul into in their efforts to retain possession of the property of the lay seigneurs whom they had despoiled by the jugglery of the "End of the World," and what with these religious persecutions, Gaul continued to be desolated down to the year 1033, the new term that had been fixed for the last day of judgment. The belief in the approaching dissolution of the world, which the clergy now again zealously preached, although not so universally entertained as that of the year 1000, was accompanied with results that were no less horrible. In 999, the expectation of the end of the world had put a stop to work; all the fields except those belonging to the ecclesiastical seigneurs, lay fallow. The formidable famine of the year 1000 was then the immediate result, and that was followed by a wide-spread mortality. Agriculture pined for laborers; every successive scarcity engendered an increased mortality; Gaul was being rapidly depopulated; famine set in almost in permanence during thirty years in succession, the more disastrous periods being those of the years 1003, 1008, 1010, 1014, 1027, 1029 and 1031; finally the famine of 1033 surpassed all previous ones in its murderous effects. The serfs, the villeins and the town plebs were almost alone the victims of the scourge. The little that they produced met the needs of their masters—the seigneurs, counts, dukes, bishops or abbots; the producers themselves, however, expired under the tortures of starvation. The corpses of the wretches who died of inanition strewed the fields, roads and highways; the decomposing bodies poisoned the air, engendered illnesses and even pestilential epidemics until then unknown; the population was decimated. Within thirty-three years, Gaul lost more than one-half its inhabitants—the new-born babies died vainly pressing their mother's breasts for nourishment.
CHAPTER II.
YVON THE FORESTER'S HUT.
Yvon—now no longer the Calf, but the Forester, since his appointment over the canton of the Fountain of the Hinds—and his family did not escape the scourge.
About five years before the famine of 1033, his beloved wife Marceline died. He still inhabited his hut, now shared with him by his son Den-Brao and the latter's wife Gervaise, together with their three children, of whom the eldest, Nominoe, was nine, the second, Julyan, seven, and the youngest, Jeannette, two years of age. Den-Brao, a serf like his father, was since his youth employed in a neighboring stone quarry. A natural taste for masonry developed itself in the lad. During his hours of leisure he loved to carve in certain not over hard stones the outlines of houses and cottages, the structure of which attracted the attention of the master mason of Compiegne. Observing Den-Brao's aptitude, the artisan taught him to hew stone, and soon confided to him the plans of buildings and the overseership in the construction of several fortified donjons that King Henry I ordered to be erected on the borders of his domains in Compiegne. Den-Brao, being of a mild and industrious disposition and resigned to servitude, had a passionate love for his trade. Often Yvon would say to him:
"My child, these redoubtable donjons, whose plans you are sketching and which you build with so much care, either serve now or will serve some day to oppress our people. The bones of our oppressed and martyrized brothers will rot in these subterraneous cells reared above one another with such an infernal art!"
"Alack! You are right, father," Den-Brao would at such times answer, "but if not I, some others will build them ... my refusal to obey my master's orders would have no other consequence than to bring upon my head a beating, if not mutilation and even death."
Gervaise, Den-Brao's wife, an industrious housekeeper, adored her three children, all of whom, in turn, clung affectionately to Yvon.