by Eugène Sue
“And it is that same equerry who sent you to this house under the guise of Mora, the Mauritanian? Was it in order to disguise yourself that you painted your face?”
“Yes — that is all so.”
“You were to spy upon your mistress, were you not? — and then poison her? Speak! If you believe in a God — if your infernal soul dares at this supreme moment to implore his help — you have but a minute to live — Speak!”
“Have pity upon me!”
“Confess your crime — you committed it under orders of Tetrik? Speak!”
“Yes, I was ordered by Tetrik.”
“When — how did he give you the order to execute that crime?”
“When I entered the room the second time — after I was sent to bring Captain Paul, who was to arrest Tetrik.”
“And the poison — you poured it into the drink that you were to present to your mistress?”
“Yes — it happened that way.”
“And on that same day,” I added, my recollections now thronging to my mind, “when I sent you to my wife, you purloined a parchment that lay on my table and that I had written upon?”
“Yes, Tetrik ordered me to — he heard Victoria refer to the parchment.”
“Why, after the crime was committed, did you stay in this house down to to-day?”
“So as to awaken no suspicions.”
“What induced you to poison your mistress?”
“The gift of these jewels that I was entertaining myself with putting on when you broke in upon me. I thought I was alone!”
“Tetrik came himself near dying of the poison — do you believe his equerry is guilty of that crime?”
“Every poison has its counter-poison,” answered the Bohemian with a sinister smile. “He who poisons others, removes suspicion from himself by drinking from the same cup, and he is safe through the counter-poison.”
The woman’s answer was a flash-light to me. By an infernal ruse, and doubtlessly guaranteed against death, thanks to an antidote, Tetrik had swallowed enough poison to produce in him the identical symptoms that marked Victoria’s agony and thus seem to share her fate.
To seize a scarf that lay upon the bed, and, despite the resistance that she offered, to tie her hands firmly together and to lock her up in one of the lower rooms, was the affair of but an instant. I ran back to the general of the army. After finally succeeding in being admitted to his presence — a difficult thing owing to the hour of the night — I repeated to him the confession that Kidda had just made to me. He shrugged his shoulders impatiently and said:
“Ever this same, rooted, thought — your mind must be wholly deranged. The idea of having me waked up to hear such crazy man’s stories. Moreover, you have chosen ill the hour to prefer such charges against the venerable Tetrik. He left Treves last evening for Bordeaux.”
The departure of Tetrik was a heavy blow to my last hopes. Nevertheless, I pressed the general with such insistence, I spoke to him with such earnestness and coherence, that he consented to order one of his officers to accompany me back to the house, and take the Bohemian girl’s confession in writing. He and I returned hurriedly to the house. I opened the door of the chamber in which I had left Kidda with her hands tied. She was gone! She must have gnawed at the scarf with her teeth, and fled by one of the windows that now stood open and that looked into the garden. In my hurry and the seething confusion of my brain I had omitted to guard against the chances of the woman’s escape by that issue.
“Poor Schanvoch!” said the officer to me with deep pity. “Your grief makes you see visions — be careful, or you will go crazy, altogether!”
And without caring to listen to me any longer he left.
The will of God be done! I now renounced all hope of uncovering the crimes of Tetrik. The next day I left the city of Treves with you and Sampso, and took the road for Brittany.
You will read, alas! with no little grief and apprehension, my son, the few lines with which I shall close this narrative. You will see how our old Gaul, after having fully reacquired her freedom by dint of three centuries of continuous struggle, after having become great and powerful under the influence of Victoria, was again to fall, not, it is true, completely under the yoke, but at least enfeoffed to the Roman Emperors through the infamous treachery of Tetrik.
Finding his projects of marriage and usurpation thwarted by the Mother of the Camps, the monster had her poisoned. She alone, had she consented to abjure her faith and contract a union with him, could have cleared the path for him to reach the hereditary throne of Gaul. With Victoria dead, he realized the futility of persevering along that route. Moreover, he soon felt that, being no longer sustained by the wisdom and sovereign influence of that august woman, the people’s affection for him was visibly ebbing. Seeing that with every day he lost some of his former prestige, and foreseeing his speedy fall, he began to cast about for the commission of one of the two acts of treason that I had long ago suspected him of contemplating. He labored in the dark to reduce Gaul, after the country had acquired its complete independence, back to the level of a dependency of the Roman Emperors. Long in advance, and by means of a thousand and one covert schemes, he sowed the germs of civil discord in the country. By these means Gaul’s powers of resistance were weakened. He succeeded in re-kindling the old jealousies between province and province that had long been allayed. By means of deliberately practiced acts of favoritism and of injustice, he incited violent rivalries between the generals and also between the several army corps. When matters were ripe for the deed of treason he secretly wrote to Aurelian, the Roman Emperor:
“The favorable moment for an attack upon Gaul has arrived. You will prevail easily over a people that is weakened by internal dissensions, and an army, one division of which is jealous of the other. I shall notify you in advance of how the Gallic troops are distributed, and also of their moves, in order to insure the prospects of your triumph.”
The two armies met on the banks of the Marne on the wide plain of Chalon. Agreeable to his promise, and acting in concert with the Roman general, Tetrik allowed the corps that he led to be cut off from the rest of the army. The Gallic legions of the Rhine fought with their wonted intrepidity, but it was of no avail. Their movements being known in advance by the enemy and overpowered by numbers, they were finally cut to pieces. Tetrik and his son took refuge in the enemy’s camp. Our army being out of the way, and our country divided against itself, as it had never been before even during the darkest days of our history, victory was rendered an easy matter to the Romans. After re-enjoying absolute freedom for many a year, Gaul became a Roman province once more. As Caesar had done before him, in order to glorify the great event, the Emperor Aurelian made a solemn entry into the Roman capital. All the captives, gathered by that emperor in the course of his long wars in Asia, marched before his chariot. Among these the queen of the Orient was seen, the heroine who emulated Victoria — Zenobia. She was loaded with golden chains riveted to the gold collar that she wore around her neck. Behind Zenobia marched Tetrik, the last Chief of Gaul before the country relapsed into a province of Rome. Tetrik and his son marched free and with heads erect, despite their infamous treachery. They wore long purple mantles over silk tunics and breeches. They represented in the procession the recent submission of the Gauls to Aurelian the Emperor.
Alas! my son, the history of our fathers will teach you that one day, three hundred years ago, another Gaul also marched before the triumphal chariot of a Roman Emperor, Caesar. That Gaul did not march in brilliant array, with audacious mien and with smiles for his vanquisher. That captive was loaded with chains, he was clad in rags, and was hardly able to walk; he was that day taken out of the dungeon where he had languished four years after having defended the freedom of Gaul inch by inch against the victorious armies of the great Caesar. That captive, one of the most heroic martyrs of our country and our independence, was called Vercingetorix, the Chief of the Hundred Valleys.
After the triumphal m
arch of Caesar, the head of the valiant defender of Gaul was cut off.
After the triumphal march of Aurelian, Tetrik, the renegade who delivered his country to the foreigner, was led with pomp to a splendid palace, the price of his sacrilegious treason.
Let not the contrast cause you to despair of virtue, my son. The justice of Hesus is eternal. Traitors will receive their punishment.
EPILOGUE.
THE NARRATIVE OF my father Amael’s great-grandfather Schanvoch on the events that transpired in Gaul — after the death of Victoria the Great, during the time that, living retiredly in Brittany on the fields of our ancestors that he bought back from a Roman colonist, he quietly spent his life with his son Alguen and his second wife Sampso — ends here.
While it is true that Gaul was again a province of Rome, nevertheless, all the practical franchises, that we reconquered so dearly by innumerable insurrections, and paid for with the blood of our fathers, have remained to us. None has dared, none will dare to deprive us of them. We shall preserve our laws and customs; we shall enjoy our full rights as citizens. Our incorporation with the Empire, the impost that we pay into the fisc, and our name of “Roman Gaul” — these are the only evidences of our dependence. Such a chain may not be heavy; but, light as it be, a chain it is. I doubt not that some day we shall be able to break it. The apprehensions that weighed upon my great-great-grandfather Schanvoch’s mind and that continue to weigh upon mine do not arise from that quarter. No! The dangers that we apprehend — if faith is to be attached to the prediction made by Victoria upon her death-bed; the danger, that has filled us with dread for the future, rises from the once more swelling number of the Frankish hordes on the other side of the Rhine, and in the dark machinations of the bishops of the new religion.
My great-great-grandfather Schanvoch died peaceably in our house, situated near the sacred stones of Karnak. He left the narrative that he wrote, and the casque’s lark, given him by Victoria, together with the previous narratives of our family and the relics that accompany them, to his son Alguen. After a long and peaceful life Alguen died, three hundred and forty years after our ancestress Genevieve saw Jesus of Nazareth perish on the cross. Alguen’s son Roderik, my grandfather, inherited from his father both our family records and relics, and a quiet, peaceful and contented life, all of which he bequeathed to his son, my father Amael, who in turn bequeathed them to me, Gildas.
I then, Gildas, make this entry to-day in our family annals three hundred and seventy-five years after the death of Jesus. I feel sad on this occasion. My father had intended to add a few words to our family annals. He postponed doing so from day to day, seeing there was nothing that he desired to make particular mention of to our descendants, his life being the uneventful one of a quiet, industrious and obscure husbandman. Two days ago my father died. He died in our own house, near the stones of Karnak, after a short illness.
The frightful predictions of Victoria, the illustrious foster-sister of my ancestor Schanvoch, have not been verified. May they never be! Gaul continues a dependence of the Roman Emperors. Occasionally a traveler reaches these parts, penetrating into these remote regions of our old Armorica. From them we have learned that, in some of the other provinces there have been several popular uprisings of considerable strength and generally called “Bagaudies.” These uprisings must have taken place shortly after the death of my ancestor Schanvoch. Brittany has remained free from the revolts of the “Bagauders.” The region enjoys profound tranquility. The impost that we pay into the emperor’s fisc is not too heavy. We live peacefully and free.
Several of our ancestors, during the darksome days of their enslavement to Rome, and when they were steeped in ignorance and misery, recorded on our family parchments that such was the leaden uniformity of their days, spent by them from dawn to dusk, in oppressive labors, that they had nothing to say except: “I was born, I have lived and I shall die in the sorrows of slavery.” May it please the gods that the happiness of the generations that are to follow me be in turn, so uniform, that each of my descendants may, as I do now, have nothing to add to our family chronicles but these lines with which I shall close my narrative:
“I have lived happy, peaceful and obscure in our Armorican Brittany cultivating our ancestral fields with the help of my family. I shall depart from this world without fear or regret when it will please Hesus to call me away to live again in yonder unknown worlds.”
I am now aged eighteen years. The family relics in my possession consist of Hena’s gold sickle, Guilhern’s little brass bell, Sylvest’s iron collar, Genevieve’s silver cross, and the casque’s lark of Schanvoch.
THE END
The Poniard’s Hilt
OR, KARADEUQC AND RONAN
Translated by Daniel de Leon
The translator of this story describes it in the preface as a ‘boisterous historic novel’. It is now 550 years since Joel was alive and the narrator in this generation is his descendant, seventy-seven year old Araim, a grandfather to Roselyk, Kervan and Karadeuqc. He writes with wry humour of the mundanity of his own life as a simple farmer, expressing deep sorrow of the subjugation of the land by Frankish invaders. His grandchildren entertain him with tales of hobgoblins and fairies. The tranquillity of their lives is shattered when Karadeuqc decides to leave home and travel to the still occupied lands, to avenge the oppression of his ancestors.
Many years pass; the old man dies and the task of continuing the family narrative passes to his descendant, Ronan the Vagre, who is the son of Karadeuqc. He is the leader of a band of brigands determined to overthrow the oppressors. They begin with the local Bishop, looting his home and freeing his servants. Bishop Cautin turns to the local Frankish lord, Neroweg, for help. Can the Vagres really resist might of the Frankish forces?
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
PART I. THE KORRIGANS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
PART II. THE VAGRES
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
PART III. THE BURG OF NEROWEG
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
PART IV. GHILDE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
EPILOGUE.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
The invasion of Gaul by Clovis introduced feudalism in France, which is equivalent to saying in Europe, France being the teeming womb of the great historic events of that epoch. It goes without saying that so vast a social system as that of feudalism could not be perfected in a day, or even during one reign. Indeed, generations passed, and it was not until the Age of Charlemagne that feudalism can be said to have taken some measure of shape and form. Between the Ages of Clovis and Charlemagne a period of turbulence ensued altogether peculiar to the combined circumstances that feudalism was forced to struggle with two foes — one internal, the disintegrating forces that ever accompany a new movement; the other external, the stubborn and inspiring resistance, on the part of the native masses, to the conqueror from the wilds of Germania. Historians, with customary levity, have neglected to reproduce this interesting epoch in the annals of that social structure that is mother to the social structure now prevalent. The task was undertaken and successfully accomplished by Eugène Sue in this boisterous historic novel entitled The Poniard’s Hilt; or, Karadeucq and Ronan, the sixth of his majestic series of historic novels, The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages. The leading charac
ters are all historic. It required the genius, the learning, the poetry, the tact, withal the daring of a Sue to weave these characters into a fascinating tale and draw a picture as vivid as the quartos, from which the facts are gathered, are musty with old age.
Daniel De Leon.
January, 1908.
PART I. THE KORRIGANS
CHAPTER I.
ARAIM.
OCCASIONALLY THEY ARE long-lived, these descendants of the good Joel, who, five hundred and fifty years ago and more lived in this identical region, near the sacred stones of the forest of Karnak. Yes, the descendants of the good Joel are, occasionally, long-lived, seeing that I, Araim, who to-day trace these lines in the seventy-seventh year of my life, saw my grandfather Gildas die fifty-six years ago at the advanced age of ninety-six, after having inscribed in his early youth a few lines in our family archives.
My grandfather Gildas buried his son Goridek, my father. I was then ten years old. Nine years later I lost my grandfather also. A few years after his demise I married. I have survived my wife, Martha, and I have seen my son Jocelyn become, in turn, a father. To-day he has a daughter and two boys. The girl is called Roselyk, she is eighteen; the elder of the two boys, Kervan, is three years his sister’s senior; the younger, my pet, Karadeucq, is seventeen.
When you read these lines, as you will some day, my son Jocelyn, you will surely ask:
“What can have been the reason that my great-grandfather Gildas made no other entry in our chronicles than the death of his father Amael? And what can be the reason that my grandfather Goridek wrote not a line? And, finally, what can be the reason that my own father, Araim, waited so long — so very long before fulfilling the wishes of the good Joel?”
To that, my son, I would make this answer:
Your great-grandfather had no particular liking for desks and parchments. Besides, very much after the style of his own father Amael, he liked to postpone for to-morrow whatever he could avoid doing to-day. For the rest, his life of a husbandman was neither less peaceful nor less industrious than that of our fathers since the return of Schanvoch to the cradle of our family, after such a very long line of generations, kept away from Armorica by the hard trials and the slavery that followed in the wake of the Roman conquest. Your great-grandfather was in the habit of saying to my father: