"There will always be time for me to add a few lines to our family's narrative; besides, it seems to me, and I admit the notion is foolish, that to write 'I have lived', sounds very much like saying 'I am about to die'—Now, then, I am so happy that I cling to life, just as oysters do to their rocks."
And so it came about that, from to-morrow to to-morrow, your great-grandfather reached his ninety-sixth year without increasing the history of our family with a single word. When he lay on his deathbed he said to me:
"My child, I wish you to write the following lines for me in our archives:
" 'My grandfather Gildas and my father Goridek lived in our house quietly and happy, like good husbandmen; they remained true to their love for old Gaul and to the faith of our fathers; they blessed Hesus for having allowed them to be born and to die in the heart of Britanny, the only province where, for so very many years, the shocks that have elsewhere shaken Gaul have hardly ever been felt—those shocks died out before the impregnable frontiers of Breton Armorica, as the furious waves of our ocean dash themselves at the feet of our granite rocks.' "
That, then, my son Jocelyn, is the reason why neither your grandfather Goridek nor his father wrote a line themselves.
"And why," you will insist, "did you, Araim, my father, why did you wait so long, until you had a son and grandchildren, before you paid your tribute to our chronicle?"
There are two reasons for that: the first is that I never had enough to say; the second is that I would have had too much to write.
"Oh!" you will be thinking when you read this. "His advanced age has deranged old Araim's mind. He says in one breath that he had too much and too little to say. Is that sensible?"
Wait a moment, my son; be not in a hurry to believe that your old father has fallen into his second infancy. Listen, and you will discover how it is that I have at once too much and not enough to write upon.
As to what concerns my own life, being an old husbandman, I have been in the same predicament as my ancestors since Schanvoch—there never was sufficient matter for me to write about. Indeed, the interesting and charming narrative would have run somewhat after this fashion: