The Galley Slave's Ring Part 33

"Only G.o.d knows it, my friends! If we are to judge of their future by their past, myriads of generations will yet succeed one another at the feet of those gigantic monuments, which seem to defy the tooth of time, and upon which the eyes of our fathers have so often rested from century to century in pious meditation."

"And why did they make the pilgrimage, father?"

"Because the cradle of our family, the fields and the homesteads of the first of our ancestors of whom these ma.n.u.scripts make mention, were situated near the stones of Karnak. As you will see, that ancestor was named _Joel, en Brenn an Lignez an Karnak_, which, as you know, means _Joel, the chief of the tribe of Karnak_. He was the chief or patriarch, chosen by his tribe, or by his clan, as the Scotch call it."[12]

"Accordingly," interjected George d.u.c.h.ene, "your name, father, the name of _Brenn_, means chief?"

"Yes, my friend, that honorable appellation, attached to the name of each individual, to his baptismal name, as the saying is since the advent of Christianity, has in the course of time been transformed into a family name. The custom of family names does not begin to be generally observed among plebeian families until towards the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Century. In earlier days, the son of the first of our ancestors, for instance, whom I mentioned to you, was called _Guilhern, mab eus an Brenn_--Guilhern, the son of the chief--then _Kirio_, grandson of the chief, and so on. In the course of time the words grandson and great-grandson were suppressed, and the only name added to the word Brenn, which was corrupted into Lebrenn, was the baptismal one.

Accordingly, almost all the names taken from a trade--as _Carpenter_, _Smith_, _Baker_, _Weaver_, _Miller_, etc., etc.--have their origin in some manual occupation, the designation of which has been converted in the course of time into a family appellation. These explanations may seem trivial; they nevertheless attest a grave and painful fact--the absence of a real family name with our brothers of the ma.s.ses of the people. Alas! So long as they were slaves or serfs, could people who did not belong to themselves have a patronymic? Their masters dubbed them with bizarre and grotesque nicknames, as one gives to a horse or a dog such names as suit his whim. When the slave was sold to a new master he was dressed up in a new name. But, as you will see, in the measure that, thanks to their energetic and unflagging struggle, the oppressed arrived at a less servile state, the consciousness of their dignity as human beings developed apace. When, finally, they could have a name of their own and transmit the same to their children, however obscure, yet always honorable, it was a sign that they were slaves no longer, nor yet serfs, although still steeped in wretchedness. The conquest of a proper, or family name, has been, by reason of the duties it imposes and the rights that it gives, one of the longest steps taken by our ancestors in the direction of their complete emanc.i.p.ation. In the ma.n.u.scripts that we are about to read you will encounter an admirable sentiment of the Gallic nationality and of its religious faith--a sentiment all the more irrepressible, all the more exaggerated, perhaps, by reason of the Roman and Frankish conquests being felt as galling yokes by those heroic men and women, who were so proud of their race and who carried their contempt for death to the point of superhuman grandeur. Let us admire them, let us emulate them in their ardent love for their country, in their implacable hatred of oppression, in their belief in the progressive continuity of life which delivers us from the _disease of death_. But, while piously glorifying the past, let us continue, in step with the movement of mankind, to march towards the future. Let us apt forget that a New World began with Christianity. Unquestionably its divine spirit of fraternity, equality and freedom has been outrageously belied, trampled in the dirt, and persecuted since the first centuries of its era by most of the Catholic bishops, who were themselves holders of slaves, and were gorged with wealth that they wheedled from the conquering Franks, in return for the absolution of their abominable crimes which the high clergy sold to them. It could be no otherwise than that our fathers, seeing the evangelical word smothered and impotent to deliver them, took matters into their own hands, rose in rebellion and in arms against the tyranny of the conquerors, and almost always, as you will find proof in these ma.n.u.scripts, where sermons only suffered s.h.i.+pwreck, revolt secured some lasting concession. It happened obedient to the time-honored behest--_Help yourself, and heaven will help you_.

Nevertheless, despite the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, the breath of Christianity has pa.s.sed over the world, and warms it more and more with that sweet and tender warmth which, notwithstanding all its grandeur, the druidic faith of our ancestors was lacking in. Thus rejuvenated and completed, our old druid belief is bound to receive a fresh impetus. It no doubt was a trying experience for us to undergo, the loss of even the name of our nationality, and to see the name of _France_ subst.i.tuted for that of our old and ill.u.s.trious Gaul by a horde of ferocious conquerors.

"No doubt the _Gallic Republic_ would sound no less pleasant to our ears than the _French Republic_. But our first and immortal Republic has sufficiently cleansed the French name of whatever monarchic odor clung to it, by carrying its colors triumphantly over all the lands of Europe.

Moreover, my friends," added the merchant with his habitual smile, "the same thing happens to that old and brave Gaul as happened to her own heroic women who rendered themselves ill.u.s.trious under their husband's name--although, to be sure, the marriage of Gaul with the Frank came about in a singularly forced manner."

"I understand that, father," observed Velleda, also smiling. "The same as many women sign their own family name beside the one they hold from their husband, all the admirable deeds performed by our heroine under a name that was not her own should be signed--FRANCE, born GAUL."

"An excellent comparison," remarked Madam Lebrenn. "Our name might change, our race has remained our race."

"And now," resumed Marik Lebrenn with deep emotion, "now that you are initiated into the family tradition which founded our plebeian archives, do you, my children take the solemn pledge to perpetuate them, and to cause your children to follow your example? Do you, my son, and you, my daughter, in default of him, pledge yourselves to register in all sincerity the deeds and events of your own lives, be they just or unjust, praiseworthy or blamable, to the end that the day when you depart from this existence to another, the narrative of your own life may increase our family chronicles, and that the inexorable sense of justice of our descendants may praise or condemn our memory, according as we shall have deserved?"

"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 ma.n.u.scripts. We shall begin the reading this very evening, in a family circle, and continue it from day to day. In order that George may partic.i.p.ate, 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 ma.n.u.script, ent.i.tled: "The Gold Sickle."

EPILOGUE

I request my reader to leap over the s.p.a.ce of time that elapsed since we left the family of Lebrenn a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sembled 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 s.h.i.+ne 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, va.s.sals. 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?"

"A knowledge of the past," observed George d.u.c.h.ene, "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 _Gaelo 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 emanc.i.p.ate 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 Roch.e.l.le by the side of _Cornelia Mirant_, his brave bride-to-be; _Salaun, the mariner_, one of the chiefs in the revolt of the va.s.sals 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 emanc.i.p.ation. 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.