Chapter XXII: Epilogue

Bertha and Nominoe live at this hour, body and soul, spirit and matter, in those starry worlds where none of us on earth has been, where we all will go--after having accomplished our mission on earth.

My son believed I was dead, having, indeed been left for dead at Nantes by the soldiers against whom I defended myself to the utmost. Even my host took me for dead. He was engaged in procuring my burial when a movement that I made revealed to him that I still lived. Nursed by my friend with fraternal care, I recovered from my wounds and remained concealed in my place of refuge until the day when I embarked secretly at Nantes on an English vessel that took me to London. From there I crossed over into Holland, where a shipowner entrusted me with one of his vessels. Finding myself exiled from France, I requested my relative at Vannes, with whom the narratives and relics of my family were left for safe-keeping, to forward them to me by a Breton vessel. I found the relics increased by Tankeru's blacksmith's hammer and the archives by the sheets of paper left by Nominoe. With the aid of the letter and of my own recollections, I, Salaun Lebrenn, completed the preceding story, which I joined to those left to me by my ancestors, and which I shall transmit to my descendants.

Alas! Perhaps I must blame myself for the death of my son. I neglected to fortify his mind against suicide by teaching him that it is not allowed to us to forestall the hour of our deliverance, and that those who endeavor to escape the trials of this life are punished by God either by separating them, if they expected to be united after death, or by condemning them to reincarnation on earth.

Alas! my expiation of the negligence has continued during these many years of exile. May the trials that I underwent disarm the just anger of God, and soften the punishment reserved for my son, before his final union in the spirit world with her who loved him to the point of dying with him.

We are now in the year 1715, and I in the ninety-first year of my life, after having resided here in Holland since the year 1675, and where, in 1680, I married Wilhelmina Vandael, the widow of the shipowner in whose employ I was. In this year Louis XIV, the execrable King of France, died. His reign continued to the end a veritable scourge to the nation. Insurrections followed insurrections, and were smothered in their own blood. Religious persecutions followed upon religious persecutions. The Edict of Nantes by which Henry IV put an end to the religious wars that lasted half a century, was revoked, and the country was again a prey to desolating religious intolerance.

The death of Louis XIV will certainly put an end to the religious persecutions; at least will mitigate them. Thousands of Protestants, banished from France by the reign of terror, will, no doubt, now return to their own country. That pleasure will not be mine. I am too feeble with years to undertake such a voyage. But if, happier than myself, you, my son Alain, should ever return to the cradle of your race, never lose sight of the fact that our family has everything to fear from the Society of Jesus, whose influence seems to be on the ascendant in almost every country.

To you, my son Alain--the son of my old age and my exile--I now bequeath these legends and relics of our family. I bequeath them to you, the younger brother of my son Nominoe, ever lamented, ever wept. Even now my eyes are blurred with tears when I recollect the double suicide of himself and Bertha of Plouernel.

May you, my son Alain, be able to transmit these legends and relics to your descendants! May you soon be able to leave the Republic of Holland, the asylum and refuge of exiles, and return to France. May you witness the realization of the prophecy of Victoria the Great--the downfall of the monarchy, the liberation of Gaul!

May you, son of Joel, live to see the dawn of the day when our country, casting off the foreign name imposed upon her by the Frankish conquest, will re-assume her old name--the _Republic of the Gauls_, and will shelter herself under the glorious folds of her own ancient red flag, surmounted by the Gallic cock!--Commune and Federation!

Finally, in the event that, having no children, you may be unable to transmit the plebeian legends of our family to your direct descendants, you shall bequeath them to one of the two surviving branches of our family.

The first is that of the Renneponts, an ancestor of whom married at La Rochelle, towards the end of the Sixteenth Century, the daughter of Odelin the armorer, son of Christian the printer. I have had no news from the Rennepont branch of our family for many long years. You will have to inquire after it in La Rochelle, where, until the end of last century I knew them to reside.

The other branch of our family is that of the Gerolsteins, sovereign Princes in Germany, and descendants of Gaelo the pirate, the grandson of our ancestor Vortigern, who met our ancestor Eidiol, the dean of the Parisian skippers, in the Tenth Century, on the occasion of the siege of Paris by the Northmans. The Princes of Gerolstein continue to reign in Germany, and have remained faithful to the Protestant religion since the time when it was embraced by Prince Charles of Gerolstein, who was the friend of Coligny, and whose son fought at the battle of Roche-la-Belle by the side of our ancestor Odelin, the armorer of La Rochelle.

Either to the Gerolsteins or the Renneponts our family archives and relics will be left by you, in the event of your not living onward in your posterity.

Along with these legends, I bequeath to you and your descendants our family hatred for the Church and for Royalty.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] All attribute to themselves the glory of success; reverses they impute to only one.

[2] The above details of the torture of Cornelius De Witt, who had the fortitude to recite this strophe in the midst of atrocious sufferings, are scrupulously exact. See Basnage, _History of the United Provinces_, vol. II, p. 171.

[3] For letters written by eye-witnesses of these atrocities, see Basnage, _History of the United Provinces; Events of the Campaign of 1672_, published at The Hague, 1675: _The Cry of the Martyrs_, published in the same city, 1673; etc., etc.

[4] It is simply impossible to give the shocking details of their disfigurement.

[5] Facts like these would seem incredible by their savage barbarity, did not authentic witnesses confirm them, almost daily, under the reign of the Grand Monarch. "The military constraint arrived in the town to the sound of bell and drum; then was furnished the melancholy spectacle of the house being demolished, the stones, the beams, the lumber, the iron publicly sold, because the owner had failed to pay his tax, etc., etc."--_Vauban, La Dime Royale_, vol. 1, chap. X. See also the _New Code of Taxes_, or the _Collected Ordinances_, Paris, 1761, article on Military Constraints; Forbonnais, _Researches in Finance, etc._

[6] Even at the end of the Eighteenth Century women among the nobility still often wore masks, especially in the country, to preserve the freshness of their color from the tan.

[7] In the Sixteenth Century, all the chemists who were engaged in the search for the philosopher's stone, a myth then much in vogue, were dubbed "blowers," because of the continual play of their bellows in the operation of fusing metals.

<pre id="pg-footer">