The Casque's Lark; or, Victoria, the Mother of the Camps

Eugène Sue

The Casque's Lark; or, Victoria, the Mother of the Camps

INTRODUCTION

I, Schanvoch, a descendant of Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak; I, Schanvoch, now a freeman, thanks to the valor of my father Ralf and the bold Gallic insurrections that continued unabated from century to century; I, Schanvoch, write the following narrative two hundred and sixty-four years after my ancestress Genevieve, the wife of Fergan, witnessed in Judea the death of the poor carpenter Jesus of Nazareth.

I write the following account thirty-four years after Gomer, the son of Judicaël and grandson of Fergan, who was a slave like his father and grandfather, wrote to his son Mederik that he had nothing to add to the family annals but the monotonous account of his life as a slave.

Neither did my ancestor Mederik contribute aught to our family history, and his son Justin contented himself with having a stranger's hand enter these short lines:

"My father Mederik died a slave, fighting as a Son of the Mistletoe for the freedom of Gaul; he told me that he was driven to revolt against the foreign oppression by the narrative of the bravery of our free ancestors and by the description of the sufferance of our enslaved fathers. I, his son Justin, a colonist, and no longer a slave of the fisc, have caused this fact to be entered upon our family parchments, which I shall faithfully transmit to my son Aurel, together with their accompanying emblems, the gold sickle, the little brass bell, the fragment of the iron collar and the little silver cross, all of which I have carefully preserved."

Aurel, Justin's son and a colonist like his father, was not any more literate than the latter, and left no record whatever. After him, again a stranger's hand inserted these lines in our family annals:

"Ralf, the son of Aurel the colonist, fought for the freedom of his country. Ralf having become absolutely free, thanks to the Gallic arms and the holy war preached by our venerable druids, found himself obliged to resort to a friend's help in order to enter the death of his father Aurel upon our family parchments. Happier than myself, my son Schanvoch will not be forced to avail himself of a stranger in order to enter in our family's archives the death of myself, the first male descendant of Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak, who again regained complete freedom. As several of my ancestors have done before me, I here declare that it was the history of our ancestors' valor and martyrdom that induced me to take up arms against the Romans, our masters and secular oppressors."

These family scrolls, together with their accompanying relics, I shall leave to you, my dear little Alguen, the son of my beloved wife Ellen, who gave you birth this day four years ago.

I choose this day, the anniversary of your birth, as a day of happy augury, in order to start, for your benefit and the benefit of our descendants, the narrative of my life and my battles, my joys and my sorrows, obedient to the last wishes of our ancestor Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak.

You will grieve, my son, when you learn from these archives that, from the death of Joel down to that of my great-grandfather Justin, seven generations, aye, seven whole generations, were subjected to intolerable slavery. But your heart will be cheered when you learn that my great-grandfather had, from a slave, become a colonist or serf attached to the glebe of Gaul – still a servile condition but greatly above that of slavery. My own father, having regained his full freedom, thanks to the formidable insurrections of the Sons of the Mistletoe that from century to century were conjured up at the voice of the druids, the tireless and heroic defenders of the freedom of oppressed Gaul, has bequeathed to me freedom, that most precious of all wealth. I shall, in turn, transmit it to you.

By dint of constantly struggling for it, and also of stubborn resistance, we Gauls have succeeded in successively reconquering almost our full former freedom. A last and frail bond still holds us to Rome, now our ally, after having formerly been our pitiless master. When that last and frail bond will be snapped, we shall have regained our absolute independence, and we shall resume our former place at the head of the great nations of the world.

Before acquainting you with the details of my life and time, my son, I must fill certain voids that are left in the history of our family through the omissions of those of our ancestors, who, either through illiteracy or the hardness of the times, were prevented from joining their respective accounts to our archives. Their lives must have been the life of all the other Gauls, who, the fetters of slavery notwithstanding, have, step by step and from century to century, conquered through revolt and battle the deliverance of our country.

You will find in the last lines written by our ancestor Fergan, the husband of Genevieve, that despite the vows taken by the Sons of the Mistletoe and despite innumerable uprisings, one of the most formidable of which was chieftained by Sacrovir, the worthy emulator of the Chief of the Hundred Valleys, the Roman yoke that Caesar imposed upon Gaul remained unshaken. In vain did Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, prophesy that the chains of the slave would be broken. The slaves still dragged their blood-stained chains. Nevertheless, our old race, weakened, mutilated, unnerved or corrupted though it was by slavery, never once was submissive, and allowed only short intervals to pass without endeavoring to shake off the yoke. The secret associations of the Sons of the Mistletoe covered the country, and furnished intrepid soldiers to each succeeding revolt against Rome.

After the heroic attempt of Sacrovir, the account of whose sublime death you will find in the narrative of our ancestor Fergan, the weak and timid weaver-slave, other insurrections broke out during the reigns of the Emperors Tiberius and Claudius; they increased in force during the civil wars that rent Italy under the reign of Nero. At about that time, one of our heroes, Vindex, as intrepid a patriot as Sacrovir or the Chief of the Hundred Valleys, long held the Roman arms in check. Civilis, another Gallic patriot, taking his stand upon the prophecies of Velleda – one of our female druids, a virile woman, wise in council and worthy compeer of our brave and wise mothers – roused almost all Gaul to revolt and gave the first serious wound to the power of Rome. Finally, during the reign of the Emperor Vitellius, a poor field slave like our ancestor Guilhern set himself up as the messiah and liberator of Gaul, just as Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed himself the Messiah of Judea, and pursued with patriotic ardor the task of liberation that was started by the Chief of the Hundred Valleys and continued after him by Sacrovir, Vindex, Civilis and so many other heroes. That field slave's name was Marik. He was then barely twenty-five years of age; robust, intelligent and gifted with heroic bravery he joined the Sons of the Mistletoe. Our venerable druids, always persecuted, had traversed Gaul inciting the lukewarm, restraining the impatient, and preparing all for the hour of the insurrection. It broke out. At the head of ten thousand slaves, field laborers like himself and armed with their scythes and forks, Marik engaged the Roman troops of Vitellius under the walls of Lyons. That first attempt miscarried; the insurgents were cut to pieces by the Roman army that greatly exceeded them in numbers. But so far from feeling overwhelmed, this defeat intensified the ardor of the revolted people. Whole populations rose in rebellion at the voice of the druids that called them to the holy war. The combatants seemed to spring out of the entrails of the earth, and Marik saw himself again at the head of a numerous army. Endowed by the gods with a military instinct, he disciplined his troops, inspired them with courage and a blind confidence in him, and marched at their head towards the banks of the Rhine, where, sheltered behind its trenches, lay the reserve of the Roman army. Marik attacked it, beat it, and compelled whole legions that he took prisoner to drop their own ensigns and substitute them with our ancient Gallic cock. Those Roman legions had, due to their long sojourn in our country, virtually become Gauls; carried away by the military ascendency of Marik, they readily joined him, combatted under him against the fresh Roman columns that were sent from Italy, and either annihilated or dispersed them. The hour of Gaul's deliverance was about to sound – but at that moment Marik fell through cowardly treason into the hands of the monster Vespasian, then Emperor of Rome. Riddled with wounds the hero of Gaul was delivered to the wild beasts in the circus, like our own ancestor Sylvest.

The martyr's death exasperated the population. Fresh insurrections broke out forthwith all over Gaul. The words of Jesus of Nazareth, declaring that the slave is the equal of his master, began to penetrate our own country, filtering through on the lips of itinerant preachers. The flames of hatred for the foreign domination shot up with renewed vigor. Attacked from all sides in Gaul, harrassed on the other side of the Rhine by innumerable hordes of Franks, barbarous warriors that issued from the depths of the northern forests and seemed but to await the propitious moment to pour into Gaul, the Romans finally capitulated to us. At last we harvested the fruits of so many heroic sacrifices! The blood shed by our fathers for the previous three centuries watered our deliverance. Indeed, the words of the Chief of the Hundred Valleys were prophetic:

"Flow, flow thou blood of the captive!Drop, drop thou dew of gore!Germinate, sprout up, thou avenging harvest!"

Yes, my son, those words were prophetic. It was with that refrain on their lips that our fathers fought and overcame the foreign oppressor. Rome, at last, yielded back to us a part of our ancient freedom. We formed Gallic legions commanded by our own officers; our provinces were once more governed by magistrates of our own choice. Rome reserved only the right to appoint a "Principal" over Gaul, the suzerainty over which she was to retain. We accepted, while waiting and striving for better things – and these better things were not long in coming. Frightened by our continual revolts, our tyrants had been slowly moderating the rigor of our slavery. Terror was to force from them that which they relentlessly refused as a matter of right and justice to the voice of suppliant humanity. First the master was no longer allowed, as he was in the days of Sylvest and several of his descendants, to dispose over the life of his slaves as one disposes over the life of an animal. Later, as their fear increased, the masters were forbidden from inflicting corporal punishments upon their slaves, except with the express authorization of a magistrate. Finally, my child, that horrible Roman law, that, at the time of our ancestor Sylvest and of the five generations that followed him, declared in its ferocious language that the slave does not exist, that "he has no head" (non caput habet) that shocking law was, thanks to the dread inspired by our unceasing revolts, modified to the point that the Justinian code declared:

"Freedom is a natural right; it is the statute law that has created slavery; it has also created enfranchisement, which is the return to natural freedom."

Alack! It is distressing to notice that the sacred rights of humanity can not triumph except at the cost of torrents of blood and of unnumbered disasters! But who is to be cursed as the true cause of all such evils? Is it not the oppressor, seeing that he bends his fellow-men under the yoke of a frightful slavery, lives on the sweat of the brow of his fellow-men, depraves, debases and martyrizes his fellow-beings, kills them to satisfy a whim or out of sheer cruelty, and thus compels them to reconquer by force the freedom that they have been deprived of? Never forget this, my son, if, once subjugated, the whole Gallic race had shown itself as patient, as timid, as resigned as did our poor ancestor Fergan the weaver, our slavery never would have been abolished! After vain appeals to the heart and reason of the oppressor, there is but one means left to overthrow tyranny – revolt – energetic, stubborn, unceasing revolt. Sooner or later right triumphs, as it triumphed with us! Let the blood that our triumph has cost fall upon the heads of those who enslaved us.

Accordingly, my son, thanks to our innumerable insurrections, slavery was at first replaced by the state of the colonist, or serfdom, the regime under which my great-grandfather Justin and my grandfather Aurel lived. Under that system, instead of being forced to cultivate under the whip and for the exclusive benefit of the Roman masters the lands that they had plundered us of by conquest, the colonist had a small share of the harvest that he gathered. He could no longer be sold as a draft horse, along with his children; he could no longer be submitted to the torture or killed; but they were, from father to children, compelled to remain attached to the same domain. If the domain was sold, the colonist likewise changed hands under the identical conditions of toil. Later the condition of the colonists was further improved; they were granted the rights of citizenship. When the Gallic legions were formed, the soldiers that composed them became completely free. My father Ralf, the son of a colonist, gained his freedom in that manner; I, the son of a soldier, brought up in camp, was born free; and I shall bequeath that freedom to you, as my father bequeathed it to me together with the duty to preserve it for your descendants.

When you will read this narrative, my son, after you will have become acquainted with the manifold sufferings of our ancestors, who were slaves for so many generations, you will appreciate the wisdom of the wish expressed by our ancestor Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak. You will admire his sagacity in expecting that, by piously preserving the memory of its bravery and of the independence that it once enjoyed, the Gallic race would be able to draw from the horror for Roman oppression the strength to overthrow it.

At this writing I am thirty-eight years of age. My parents are long dead. Ralf, my father, a soldier in one of our Gallic legions, in which he enrolled at the age of eighteen in the south of Gaul, came into this region, near the western banks of the Rhine, along with the army. He was in all the battles that were fought with the ferocious hordes of the Franks, who, attracted by the fertility of our Gaul and by the wealth contained in our borders, encamped on the opposite shore of the river, ever ready to attempt a new invasion.

About four years ago a descent of the insular population of England was feared in Brittany. On that occasion several legions, the one in which my father enlisted among them, were ordered into that province. During several months he was quartered in the city of Vannes, not far from Karnak, the cradle of our family. Having had one of his friends read to him the narratives of our ancestors, Ralf visited with pious respect the battle field of Vannes, the sacred stones of Karnak, and the lands that we were plundered of in Caesar's time by the Roman conquerors. The lands were held by a Roman family; colonists, sons of the Breton Gauls of our tribe and who had formerly been in bondage, now cultivated the lands that their ancestors one time owned. The daughter of one of those colonists loved my father; her love was reciprocated; her name was Madalene; she was one of those proud and virile Gallic women, that our ancestress Margarid, the wife of Joel, was a type of. She followed my father when his legion left Brittany to return to the banks of the Rhine, where I was born in the fortified camp of Mayence, a military city that our troops occupied. The chief of the legion to which my father belonged was the son of a field laborer. His bravery won him the post. On the day after my birth that chief's wife died in child-bed of a baby girl – a girl who, some day perhaps, may yet, from the retreat of her humble home, reign over the world as she reigns to-day over Gaul. To-day, at the time that I write, Victoria, by virtue of her distinguished wisdom, her eminent qualities, the benign influence that she exercises over her son Victorin and over our whole army, is, in point of fact, empress of Gaul.

Victoria is my foster-sister. Prizing the solid qualities of mind and heart that my mother was endowed with, when Victoria's father became a widower, he requested my mother to nurse his little babe. Accordingly, she and I grew up like brother and sister. We never since failed in the fraternal affection of our childhood. From her earliest age Victoria was serious and gentle, although she greatly delighted in the blare of trumpets and the sight of arms. She gave promise to be some day of that august beauty that mingles calmness, grace and energy, and that is peculiar to certain women of Gaul. You will see medals that have been struck in her honor when she was still a young maid. She is there represented as Diana the huntress, with a bow in one hand and a torch in the other. On a later medal, struck about two years ago, Victoria is represented with her son Victorin in the guise of Minerva accompanied by Mars. At the age of ten she was sent by her father to a college of female druids. Being now again freed from Roman persecution, thanks to the new birth of Gallic freedom, the druids, male and female, again attended to the education of children as they did of yore.

Victoria remained with these venerable women until her fifteenth year. She drew from that patriotic and strict tuition an ardent love for her country, and information on all subjects. She left the college equipped with the secrets of former times, and, it is said, possessing, like Velleda and other female druids, the power of seeing into the future. At that period of her life the proud and virile beauty of Victoria was sublime. When she met me again she was happy and she did not conceal her joy. So far from declining through our long separation from each other, her affection for me, her foster-brother, had increased.

I must at this point make an admission to you, my son; I am free to make it because you will not read these lines until after you will be a man. You will find a good example of courage and abnegation in my confession.

When Victoria returned in her dazzling beauty of fifteen years I was of the same age and although hardly of the age of puberty myself, I fell distractedly in love with her. I carefully concealed my feelings, out of friendship as well as by reason of the respect that, despite the fraternal attachment of which she every day gave me fresh proof, that serious young maid, who brought with her from the college of the female druids an indescribably imposing, pensive and mysterious appearance, inspired in me. I then underwent a cruel trial. Ignorant of the feelings of my heart, as she ever will be, at fifteen and a half Victoria gave her hand to a young military chief. I came near dying of a slow consuming illness caused by my secret despair. So long as my life seemed in danger, Victoria did not leave the head of my couch. A tender sister could not have attended me with more devoted and touching care. She became a mother. Although a mother, she ever accompanied her husband, to whom she was passionately devoted, whenever called to war. By force of reflection I succeeded at last in overcoming, if not my love, at least its violent manifestations, the pain it gave me, the senselessness of the passion. But there remained in me a sense of boundless devotion towards my foster-sister. She asked me to remain near her and her husband as a horseman in the body of cavalrymen that ordinarily act as escorts to the Gallic chiefs, and either take down in writing or convey their military orders. My foster-sister was barely eighteen years of age when, in a severe battle with the Franks, she lost on the same day both her father and her husband. A widow with her son, for whom she foresaw a glorious future, bravely verified by himself since then, Victoria never left the camp. The soldiers, accustomed ever to see her in their midst, with her child in her arms, and walking between her father and her husband, knew that more than once her profoundly wise advice prevailed in the councils of the chiefs as the advice of our mothers of old often prevailed in the councils of our forefathers. They came to look as a good omen upon the presence of this young woman, who was trained in the mysterious science of the druids. At the death of her father and husband they begged her not to leave the army, declaring to her with naïve affection that thenceforth her son Victorin should be "Son of the Camps" and she the "Mother of the Camps." Touched by so much affection, Victoria remained with the troops, preserving her influence over the chiefs, directing them in the government of Gaul, sedulous in imparting a manly education to her son, and living as modestly as the wife of an officer.

Shortly after her husband's death, my foster-sister told me that she would never marry again, it being her intention to consecrate her life entirely to Victorin. The last and insane hope that I nursed when I saw her a widow and free again, was dashed. With time I recovered my senses. I suppressed my ill-starred love and gave no thought but to the service of Victoria and her son. A simple horseman in the army, I served my foster-sister as her secretary. Often she confided important state secrets to me. At times she even charged me with confidential embassies to the military chiefs of Gaul.

I taught Victorin to ride, to handle the lance and the sword. Soon I came to love him as an own son. A kinder and more generous disposition than that of the lad could not be imagined. Thus he grew up among the soldiers, who became attached to him by a thousand bonds of habit and of affection. At the age of fourteen he made his first campaign against the franks, who were fast becoming as dangerous enemies to us as the Romans once were. I accompanied him. Like a true Gallic woman his mother remained on horseback and surrounded by the officers, on a hill from which the battle field could be seen on which her son was engaged. He comported himself bravely and was wounded. Being thus from early youth habituated to the life of war, the youth developed great military talents. Intrepid as the bravest of the soldiers, skilful and cautious as a veteran captain, generous to the full extent that his purse allowed it, of a joyful disposition, open and kind to all, he gained ever more the attachment of the army that soon divided with him its adoration for his mother.

The day finally arrived when Gaul, already almost independent, demanded to share with Rome the government of our country. The power was then divided between a Gallic and a Roman chief. Rome appointed Posthumus, and our troops unanimously acclaimed Victorin as the Gallic chief and general of the army. Shortly after, he married a young girl by whom he was dearly loved. Unfortunately she died within the year, leaving him a son. Victoria, now a grandmother, devoted herself to her son's child as she had done before to himself, and surrounded the babe with all the cares that the tenderest solicitude could inspire.

My early resolve was never to marry. I was nevertheless gradually attracted by the modest graces and the virtue of the daughter of one of the centurions of our army. She was your mother, Ellen, whom I married five years ago.

Such has been my life until this day, when I start the narrative that is to follow. Certain remarks of Victoria decided me to write it both for your benefit and the benefit of our descendants. If the expectations of my foster-sister, concerning several incidents in this narrative, are eventually realized, those of our relatives who in the centuries to come may happen to read this story will discover that Victoria, the Mother of the Camps, was gifted, like Hena, the Virgin of the Isle of Sen, and Velleda, the female druid and companion of Civilis, with the holy gift of prevision.

What I am here about to narrate happened a week ago. In order to fix the date with greater accuracy I certify that it is written in the city of Mayence, defended by our fortified camp on the borders of the Rhine, on the fifth day of the month of June, as the Romans reckon, of the seventh year of the joint principality of Posthumus and Victorin in Gaul, two hundred and sixty-four years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, the friend of the poor, who was crucified in Jerusalem under the eyes of our ancestress Genevieve.