The Galley Slave's Ring Part 32

GHILDE

on the other the following two words in the Celtic and Gallic tongues respectively--very much resembling the Breton of our own days:

AMINTIAICH (Friendship) COMMUNITEZ (Community)

The poniard's hilt was every bit of thirteen hundred years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 7, dated the year 615 of our era, a rusty branding needle was attached. This article was fully twelve hundred and thirty-four years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 8, dated the year 737 of our era, an abbatial crosier was attached. It was of chiseled silver and bore evidence of once having been gilded over. The name _Meroflede_ could be deciphered amid the exquisitely wrought ornamentation of the relic. The crosier was eleven hundred and twelve years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 9, dated the year 811, two pieces of Carlovingian money were attached. Their reverse bore the effigy of Charlemagne, still recognizable. One of the coins was of copper, the other of silver. They were held together by an iron wire. The two coins were ten hundred and thirty-eight years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 10, dated the year 912, was attached a barbed iron arrow head. The arrow-head was nine hundred and thirty-seven years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 11, dated the year 999, was attached a fragment of an infant's skull. The child, judging by the size and structure of the fragment, must have been between eight and ten years of age. The external wall of the fragment bore, graven in the Gallic tongue, the words:

FIN-AL-BRED (The End of the World).

The skull was eight hundred and fifty years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 12, dated the year 1096, was attached a ribbed white sh.e.l.l, of the sort that is seen on the pictures of pilgrims'

mantles. The frail sh.e.l.l was seven hundred and fifty-three years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 13, dated the year: 1208, was attached a pair of iron pincers, an instrument of torture, the tongues of which were serrated so that the teeth fitted exactly into one another. This instrument of torture was six hundred and forty-one years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 14, dated the year 1358, was attached a little iron trevet of about twenty centimeters in diameter, that looked as if it, had been almost fretted out of shape by fire. The trevet was four hundred and ninety-nine years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 15, bearing the date of the year 1413, was attached an executioner's knife with a horn handle, the blade of which was eaten up with rust and partly broken. The knife was four hundred and thirty-six years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 16, bearing the date of the year 1535, was attached a little pocket Bible, belonging to the first years of the printing press. The cover of the book was almost wholly burnt up, likewise the corners of the pages, as if the Bible had been exposed to fire. Several pages also bore stains that must have been of blood. The Bible was three hundred and fourteen years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 17, dated the year 1673, was attached the iron head of a heavy blacksmith's hammer, on which, engraved in the Breton tongue, could be read the words:

EZ-LIBR (To be free).

The hammer was one hundred and seventy-six years old.

To ma.n.u.script Number 18, dated the year 1794, was attached a sword of honor, with hilt of gilded copper bearing, the following inscription engraved on the blade:

JOHN LEBRENN HAS DESERVED WELL OF THE FATHERLAND.

Finally, unaccompanied by any ma.n.u.script, and only bearing the dates of 1848 and 1849, came the last two articles that made up the collection:

The dragoon's casque which was presented in February of 1848 to Marik Lebrenn by the Count of Plouernel, and the iron ring that the merchant had worn in the galleys of Rochefort that very year of 1849.

It can easily be imagined with what pious respect and burning curiosity these fragments of the past were examined by the merchant's family. He interrupted the pensive silence that his children preserved during the examination, and resumed:

"Accordingly, as you see, my children, these ma.n.u.scripts relate the history of our plebeian family for the last two thousand years.

Accordingly, also, this history could be called the history of the people, of their faults, their excesses, occasionally even of their crimes Slavery, ignorance and misery often deprave man in degrading him. But thanks be to G.o.d, in our family, the bad acts are rare, while, on the other hand, numerous have been the patriotic and heroic deeds of our Gallic forefathers and mothers during their long struggle against the Roman and then the Frankish conquest. Yes, the men and the women--for, often will you see in the pages of these narratives that the women, like worthy daughters of Gaul, vie with the men in abnegation and intrepidity. Many a one of these touching and heroic figures will remain cherished and glorified in your memory as the saints of our domestic legend. Now, one word concerning the language used in these ma.n.u.scripts.

As you know, my children, your mother and I have ever kept at your side, since your earliest years, a female servant from our own country, in order that you might learn to speak the Breton dialect at the same time that you learned to speak French; furthermore, your mother and I ever kept you familiar with that dialect by using it frequently in conversation with you."

"Yes, father."

"Well, my son," said Marik Lebrenn to Sacrovir, "in teaching you the Breton tongue I had above all in mind--obedient, moreover, to a tradition in our family, according to which it never forgot its mother tongue--to enable you to read these ma.n.u.scripts."

"Are they, then, written in the Breton tongue, father?" asked Velleda.

"Yes, my children. The Breton tongue is none other than the Celtic or Gallic that was once spoken all over Gaul before the Roman and Frankish conquests. With the exception of a few changes that have taken place in the course of the centuries, it has preserved its purity in our Brittany, down to our own days. Of all the provinces of Gaul, Brittany was the last to submit to the Frankish Kings who issued from the conquest. Yes, let us never forget the proud and heroic motto of our fathers, conquered and despoiled though they were by the invader: _We still preserve our name, our tongue, our faith._ Now, then, my children, after two thousand years of struggles and strifes, our family has preserved its name, its tongue and its faith. We call ourselves _Lebrenn_, we speak Gallic, and I have raised you in the faith of our fathers, in the faith of the immortality of the soul and of the continuity of existence which enables us to look upon death as a change of habitation, nothing more--a sublime faith the morality of which, taught by the druids, was summed up in precepts like these: _Adore G.o.d; do no harm; exercise charity; he is pure and holy who performs celestial works and pure._ Fortunately, my children, we are not the only ones who preserved the sublime dogma of the continuity of life. Armand Barbes, one of the bravest militants of the democracy, when taken prisoner and subsequently condemned to death under the reign of Louis Philippe, awaited the hour of his execution with religious serenity of soul. The serenity which he preserved he drew from his faith in the perpetuity of life, a fundamental principle in our creed. I can do no better, my friends, than to read to you a page from the writings of Armand Barbes, the page which he dedicated to the memory of G.o.defroid Cavaignac, the publicist of the democracy, ent.i.tled: 'Two days of a death sentence.'"

Lebrenn read:

"It was the 12th of June, 1839. After four days' deliberation the Court of Peers notified me of its sentence. According to the usage in such cases, it was the registrar who brought me the sentence, and the honorable Cauchy thought it his duty to add to his message a little puff for the Roman Catholic and Apostolic religion. I answered him that I had my own religion and believed in G.o.d, but that that was no reason why I should be in need of the consolations of a priest, whosoever he might be. I requested him to be kind enough to inform his masters that I was ready to die, and that I only hoped that when their last hour approached their soul might be as tranquil as mine.

"Armand Barbes then proceeds to tell how, instinctively inspired, and led by the approach of his last hour to a plane of lofty thought, he recalled with thrilling grat.i.tude the source from which he drew his supreme tranquility in the face of death. He then says further:

"One day I read in the _New Encyclopedia_ the superb article on _Heaven_ by John Raynaud. Pa.s.sing by the irrefutable arguments with which he incidentally demolishes the heaven and h.e.l.l of the Catholics, his leading thought, as taught by the druid faith, of deriving from the law of progress the infinite series of our lives, as they continuously progress in worlds that gravitate ever nearer and nearer to G.o.d, seemed to me to satisfy at once all our multiple aspirations. Do not the moral sense, the imagination, do not our desires, does not everything find there its place? Nevertheless, carried away, while I read the article, by the pre-occupations of an active republican, I gave at the time little thought to details; all I did with these was to deposit them, so to speak, undigested in my heart. But later, when picked up wounded on the street I inhabited a prison cell with the scaffold in perspective, I drew them out of the place where I held them in reserve as a last store of wealth the value of which the time had come for me to appreciate in full--and these thoughts rose naturally to my mind during my watches, already a victim bound for the executioner, during these solitary hours when I kept watch in the solemn night of death.

"I beg pardon of John Raynaud, the elegant encyclopedist, for my having turned into a vile plummet, in order to meet the exigency of the moment, the pure gold of his philosophy. Thus, after confirming with some preliminary reasoning my belief in the immortality of the soul, meseems a sublime Jacob's ladder unrolled before my eyes, with its foot resting on the earth to climb heavenward, eternally, from star to star, from sphere to sphere! The cart, this planet upon which I had spent thirty years, looked to me to be one of the innumerable specks where man makes his first landing in life--whence he begins to climb upwards before G.o.d, and, when the phenomenon which we call death is accomplished, man, drawn by the attraction of progress, is forthwith re-born in a superior star with a new expansion of his being.

"So you see, my children, what fort.i.tude of soul the dogma of the perpetuity of life is able to impart. Let us, then, follow the example of our forefathers; let us follow in the footsteps of their belief; and let us, like them, _preserve our name, our tongue and our faith_."

"We shall not fail in that pledge, father," answered Velleda.

"We shall show neither less courage nor less persistence than our ancestors," added Sacrovir. "Oh, how I shall be thrilled with ecstasy when I read those venerated lines which they have traced! But is the chirography of the Celtic or Gallic language the same exactly as the Breton, which we are accustomed to read, father?"

"No, my boy. Since a number of centuries back, the Gallic chirography, which originally was the same as the Greek, began to be little by little modified in the course of time, and finally fell into disuse. But my grandfather, a working compositor, learned and well lettered, transcribed into modern Breton all the ma.n.u.scripts that were in Gallic.

Thanks to his work, you will be able to read those ma.n.u.scripts as fluently as you read the legends that our good Gildas loves so well, and which, composed eight or nine hundred years ago, are still current in our villages of Brittany, printed on brown paper."

"Father!" exclaimed Sacrovir. "One more question. Did our family always inhabit our beloved Brittany during all these centuries?"

"No--not always, as you will see in these narratives. The conquest, the wars, the rude vicissitudes to which a family like ours was exposed in those evil days, often compelled our forefathers to leave their natal soil,--sometimes because they were carried away slaves or prisoners into other provinces; sometimes in order to escape death; other times, again, in order to gain their bread; still other times in obedience to foreign laws; and, finally, occasionally driven thereto by the whims of fate.

Nevertheless, few are our forefathers who did not make a certain pious pilgrimage, as I have made myself, and as you, in turn will make on the first of January following the year of your majority, that is next January 1."

"And why on that particular day, father?"

"Because the first day of each new year has ever been a solemn day with the Gauls."

"And in what does the pilgrimage consist?"

"You will proceed to the druid stones of Karnak, near Auray."

"Indeed, I have heard it said, father, that that a.s.semblage of gigantic granite blocks, found down to to-day, ranked in a mysterious fashion, dates back to the remotest antiquity."

"Already two thousand years and more ago, my boy, it was not known at what epoch--an epoch that is lost in the night of the past--the stones of Karnak were raised and put in place."

"Oh! father, one is seized as with a vertigo in thinking of the age that those monumental stones must have."