And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verrière de Verny le Moustier) may smell sweet and blossom in the dust—a memory pleasant to recall—to this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as filial love and ancestral pride can make them….
And oh! looking backward (as we did), be tender to the failings of your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their long buried hearts should one day be revealed to you! Their faults are really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood, so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will soon, thanks to
"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"
* * * * *
Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused, in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of woe still worse than yours—worse with all the accumulated interest of long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!
* * * * *
And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense—mere common-sense—it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect education. I am but a poor scribe!
Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been devoted to the following out of this slender clew—with what surprising results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.
We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry as well—the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs, etc.—which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the easier—and the more difficult to leave.
What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have seen—actually seen—de nos propres yeux vu—Napoleon Bonaparte himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive, unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory for ages and ages yet to come!