Collected Works of Eugène Sue

by Eugène Sue

  “‘Here, my friends, is the best of Republics—’

  “Such was the result for which the people of Paris had fought for three days! It is for this that we risked our lives, that you shed your blood, my son — and that our old friends Castillon and Duchemin died valiantly, as did so many other patriots.”

  “Great heaven! Father, what say you! Castillon — Duchemin — both dead!”

  In agony at his unfortunate words, Lebrenn turned to his wife: “Our son did not know, then, the fate of our friends?”

  “Poor old Castillon — I loved him so,” sobbed Marik, while his tears poured upon the pillow. “Brave Duchemin — how did he meet his end?”

  “In spite of his age,” said General Oliver, who had so far been a silent spectator of the scene, “he did not leave my side the whole day of the 27th. His patriotic fervor seemed to double his strength. That night he went home with me. At daybreak of the 28th we rejoined, in Prouvaires Street, the citizens who were defending the barricades there. The colonel who commanded the attack, despairing of ever capturing the barricade, attempted to demolish it with his cannon. A piece was brought up, and at the first round a bullet rebounded and tore into Duchemin’s thigh. He fell, crying ‘Long live the Republic!’ Then he forced a smile on his lips, and with his last breath said to me, ‘I die like an old republican cannonier. Long live the Commune!’”

  Just then a servant entered, and said to Lebrenn, “Sir, one of the workingmen who was here four days ago is come to ask news of Marik.”

  “Let him come in,” replied the young man’s father.

  It was the artisan who, on the 27th, had acted as spokesman for his comrades of St. Denis Street. His head was wrapped in a bloody bandage; he was also wounded in the leg, and supported himself as with a cane, with the scabbard of a cavalry saber.

  “I heard that your son was wounded, Monsieur Lebrenn. I came to inquire after him,” he said.

  “My son’s condition is causing us no uneasiness,” Madam Lebrenn answered. “Be pleased to take a seat beside his bed, for you also are wounded.”

  “I received a saber cut on the head and a bayonet thrust in the leg. But they will be healed in a day or two.”

  Marik held out his hand to the workman, and said: “Thanks to you, citizen, for thinking of me. Thank you for your mark of sympathy.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing, Monsieur Marik,” replied the workman, heartily pressing the proffered hand. “Only I am sorry to have to come alone to see you, because the two comrades who accompanied me here — the other evening—”

  “They are also wounded?” asked John Lebrenn hastily.

  “They are dead, sir,” sighed the workman.

  “Still martyrs! How much blood Kings cause to flow! What woes they bring to families!”

  “Here, dear son, is how the political farce was wound up,” began John Lebrenn again, to complete his interrupted account. “The majority of the 221 opposition deputies, typified in Casimir Perier, Dupin, Sebastiani, Guizot, Thiers, and a few other reprobates, were terrified when they saw the insurrection on the 28th grow to formidable proportions. For, had it been defeated, the 221 would have been taken as its instigators, and, as such, assuredly condemned for high treason either to death or to life imprisonment; on the other hand, if it was successful, they dreaded the establishment of the Republic. To conjure off this double peril, they declared in their special sessions that they still regarded Charles X as the legitimate King, and that if he would revoke the ordinances and discharge his minister, they would at all costs stand for the continuation of the elder branch. Penetrated by this thought, they went to Marshal Marmont on the 28th to beg him to cease firing, declaring that if the ordinances were repealed, Paris would return to its duty. The Prince of Polignac, full of faith in his army, would listen to no proposition on the 27th nor on the 28th. He counted on the intervention of God. The stupid monarch and his minister did not begin to recognize the gravity of their situation till the evening of the 29th, when the troops, thoroughly routed, beat a retreat upon St. Cloud. Then the ordinances were repealed, and Messieurs Mortemart and Gerard were appointed ministers. Charles imagined that these concessions would mollify the insurrectionists, and cause them to throw down their arms.”

  “And what sort of a role did James Lafitte play through all this?” again inquired Marik.

  “The minority of the deputies convened at his house, and, from the 28th on, they judged the kingship of Charles to be at an end. Thenceforward, yielding to the counsel of Beranger, they labored actively for the Duke of Orleans. The rich bourgeoisie, the big commercial men, and a certain number of military chieftains, Gerard and Lobau among them, also rallied to the Orleanist party, desiring a new kingdom under which they hoped to place the actual government in the hands of a bourgeois oligarchy. The house of James Lafitte was thus the center of the Orleanist wire-pullings. You asked my advice,” continued Lebrenn to the workingman, “in the name of your comrades, before entering the fight. In the light of our present set-back, do you regret having assisted in the revolution?”

  “No, Monsieur Lebrenn; I have no regret for having taken up arms. No doubt we have not obtained what we sought, a government of the people. But is it nothing to have cleaned out the Bourbons who wished to enslave us? If we did not get the Republic this time, we at least know how to go about driving out a King and defeating his army. We shall appeal to the spirit of insurrection!”

  “The day of retribution will come, my friend,” declared Lebrenn. “A few elected men, chosen not by the rank and file of the citizens, but by a small party representing the privilege of riches, has decided upon the form of government for France and has offered the crown to Louis Philippe. They have stained themselves with the guilt of usurping the sovereignty of the people, which is single, indivisible, and inalienable. To this usurpation we shall reply by a permanent conspiracy until the day of that new revolution when shall be proclaimed the Republican government, which alone is compatible with the sovereignty of the people, which alone is capable of striking off the material and mental shackles of the proletariat. The Commune, and the Federation under the Red Flag! Neither priests, nor Kings, nor masters!”

  “On that day,” re-echoed the stalwart proletarian at Marik’s bedside, “we shall all rise in arms, and cry:

  “Long live the Republic! Long live the Commune!”

  CONCLUSION

  I, JOHN LEBRENN, concluded the writing of this account on the 29th of December, 1831, the eve of the day on which a daughter was born to my son Marik; she was named Velleda, in memory of our Gallic nationality.

  To you, Marik, my beloved son, I bequeath this chronicle, along with the sword I received from General Hoche the day of the battle of Weissenburg. You will join them to the other legends and relics of our family, and you will bequeath them, in your turn, to your son Sacrovir. You will add to these scrolls the history of whatever new events may befall in your time, and our posterity will continue, from generation to generation, these our domestic annals.

  And now sons of Joel, courage, perseverance, hope — not only hope, but certitude. In spite of the transient eclipses of the star of the Republic since the beginning of this century, in spite of the disappointment of which we were the victims in 1830, in spite of all the trials which we, and our children, perhaps, have yet to undergo, the future of the world belongs to the principle of Democracy.

  I, Marik Lebrenn, inscribe here, with unspeakable anguish, the date of April 17, 1832, the evil day on which my beloved father and mother, both at the same hour, although some distance from each other, died under the scourge of the cholera. They retained to the end the serenity of their unsullied lives, and went to await us in those mysterious worlds where we shall at last be reborn, to continue to live in mind and body, and follow there our eternal existence.

  THE END

  The Galley Slave’s Ring

  OR, THE FAMILY OF LEBRENN. A TALE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848

  Translated by Daniel de Leo
n

  The last instalment of The Mysteries of the People, The Galley Slave’s Ring is set against the backdrop of the Revolution of 1848. The story opens in St. Denis in the linen draper’s shop of Marik Lebrenn. A good, hard-working family man, Lebrenn employs two shop assistants, Jeanike and Gildas, who are of Breton blood, like himself. There is one mystery — Marik keeps a locked room at the rear of the house, with shutters always closed, into which he sometimes goes alone. No-one knows what is in that room. A military man stops at the shop periodically and looks in the window, as if he is observing rather than browsing. Opposite the Breton’s shop is another tall building and on the fifth floor a young man named George Duchene decides to rent a room. He cares tenderly for his frail grandfather, but his heart longs for social and political change. He is of Gallic descent and the Lebrenn are Bretons; yet Marik invites George to his shop as a guest. A friendship between Gaul and Breton — can the two warring sides of this great saga finally be reconciled?

  CONTENTS

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  EPILOGUE

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

  WITH THIS STORY, The Galley Slave’s Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn, closes the series of the nineteen historic novels comprised in Eugène Sue’s monumental work The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages.

  They who have read the preceding eighteen stories will agree that from the moment they began the first volume of the series, The Gold Sickle; or, Hena the Virgin of the Isle of Sen, down to the eighteenth, The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic, they enjoyed a matchless promenade as they followed Sue through the Ages of History, from the time of the invasion of Gaul by Julius Caesar, shortly before Christ, down to the great epoch marked by the French Revolution. Nor will their expectations concerning this closing story be disappointed.

  The Galley Slave’s Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn is staged on the Age that witnessed the downfall of Louis Philippe — the last of the Bourbon line — and the aspirations that raised the Second Republic. While several of the figures are historic, in this story historic characters step forth less pronouncedly than historic principles. In this story are found the Principles, the old and the newest, that have since occupied the stage of man’s history, and the clash of which, down to our own days, occupies man’s attention.

  Inestimable as the previous stories are to the understanding of the Age of the present story, the present story, enlivened with the vein of romance, is inestimable to the understanding of our own Age.

  DANIEL DE LEON.

  Milford, Conn., February, 1911.

  CHAPTER I.

  GILDAS AND JEANIKE.

  ON FEBRUARY 23, 1848, the epoch when, for several days previous, all France, and especially Paris, was profoundly stirred by the question of the reform banquets, there was to be seen on St. Denis Street, a short distance from the boulevard, a rather large shop surmounted by the sign

  LEBRENN, LINEN DRAPER.

  THE SWORD OF BRENNUS.

  In fact, a picture, pretty well drawn and painted, represented the well known historic incident of Brennus, the chief of the Gallic army, throwing with savage and haughty mien his sword into one of the scales of the balance that held the ransom of Rome, vanquished by our Gallic ancestors, about two thousand and odd years ago.

  At first, the people of the St. Denis quarter derived a good deal of fun from the bellicose sign of the linen draper. In course of time they forgot all about the seemingly incongruous sign in the recognition of the fact that Monsieur Marik Lebrenn was a most admirable man — a good husband, a conscientious father of his family, and a merchant who sold at reasonable prices excellent merchandise, among other things superb Brittany linen, imported from his native province. The worthy tradesman paid his bills regularly; was accommodating and affable towards everybody; and filled, to the great satisfaction of his “dear comrades,” the function of captain in the company of grenadiers of his battalion in the National Guard. All told, he was held in general esteem by the people of his quarter, among whom he was justified to consider himself as a notable.

  On the rather chilly morning of February 23, the shutters of the linen draper’s shop were as usual removed by the shop-lad, assisted by a female servant, both of whom were Bretons like their master, Monsieur Lebrenn, who was in the habit of taking all his attendants, clerks as well as domestic servitors, from his own country.

  The maid, a fresh and comely lass of twenty years, was named Jeanike. The lad who tended the shop was called Gildas Pakou. He was a robust youngster from the region of Vannes, whose open countenance bore the impress of wonderment, seeing he was only two days in Paris. He spoke French quite passably; but in his conversations with Jeanike, his “country-woman,” he preferred the idiom of lower Brittany, the old Gallic tongue that our ancestors spoke before the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar.

  Gildas Pakou seemed preoccupied, although busy carrying to the interior of the shop the shutters that he removed from the outside. He even paused for a moment in the middle of the shop, and, leaning both his arms and his chin upon the edge of one of the boards that he had unfastened, seemed profoundly steeped in thought.

  “What are you brooding over, Gildas?” inquired Jeanike.

  “Lassy,” he answered in his Breton tongue, and with a distant and almost comical look, “do you remember the song of our country — Genevieve and Rustefan?”

  “Sure! I was sung to sleep in my cradle with it. It starts this way:

  “When little John led his sheep out to pasture,

  He then little thought that a priest he would be.”

  “Well, Jeanike, I am like little John. When I was at Vannes I little dreamed of what I was to see in Paris.”

  “And what do you find so startling in Paris, Gildas?”

  “Everything, Jeanike.”

  “Indeed!”

  “And a good many other things, besides!”

  “That’s a good many.”

  “Now listen. Mother said to me: ‘Gildas, Monsieur Lebrenn, our countryman, to whom I sell the linen that we weave in the evenings, takes you as an assistant in his shop. His is a home of the good God. You, who are neither bold nor venturesome, will find yourself there as comfortable as here in our little town. St. Denis Street in Paris, where your employer lives, is a street inhabited only by honest and peaceful merchants.’ Well, now, Jeanike, no later than yesterday evening, the second day after my arrival, did you not hear cries of: ‘Close the shops! Close the shops!’ And did you not thereupon see the night-patrols, and hear the drums and the hurried steps of large numbers of men who came and went tumultuously? There were among them some whose faces were frightful to behold, with their long beards. I positively dreamed of them, Jeanike! I did!”

  “Poor Gildas!”

  “And if that were only all!”

  “What! Is there still more? Have you, perchance, anything to blame our master for?”

  “Him? He is the best man in all the world. I’m quite sure of that. Mother told me so.”

  “Or Madam Lebrenn?”

  “The dear, good woman! She reminds me of my own mother with her sweet temper.”

  “Or mademoiselle?”

  “Oh! As to her, Jeanike, we may say of her in the words of the Song of the Poor:

  “Your mistress is handsome and brimful of kindness;

  As lovely her face, yet her deeds with it vie,

  And her looks and her kindness have won all our hearts.”

  “Oh, Gildas! How I do love to hear those songs of our country. That pa
rticular one seems to have been composed expressly for Mademoiselle Velleda, and I—”

  “Tush, Jeanike!” exclaimed the shop-assistant, breaking in upon his companion. “You asked me what there is to astonish me. Tell me, do you think that mademoiselle’s name is a Christian woman’s name? Velleda! What can that mean?”

  “What do I know! I suppose ’tis a fancy of monsieur and madam’s.”

  “And their son, who went back yesterday to his business college.”

  “Well?”

  “What another devil’s own name is that which he also has? One ever seems to be about to swear when pronouncing it. Just pronounce that name, Jeanike. Come, pronounce it.”

  “It is very simple. The name of our master’s son is Sacrovir.”

  “Ha! ha! I knew it would be so. You did look as if you were swearing — Sacr-r-r-rovir.”

  “Not at all! I did not roll the r’s like you.”

  “They roll of themselves, my lassy. But, after all, do you call that a name?”

  “That also is a fancy of monsieur and madam’s.”

  “Very well, and what about the green door?”

  “The green door?”