The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated 1 The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated by Daniel De Leon This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Poniard's Hilt Or Karadeucq and Ronan. A Tale of Bagauders and Vagres Author: Eugène Sue Release Date: March 25, 2010 [eBook #31782] The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated 2 Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PONIARD'S HILT*** E-text prepared by Chuck Greif and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from scanned images of public domain material generously made available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com/) Note: Images of the original pages are available through the the Google Books Library Project. See http://books.google.com/books?vid=kNMrAAAAMAAJ&id THE PONIARD'S HILT * * * * * THE FULL SERIES OF The Mysteries of the People OR History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages By EUGENE SUE Consisting of the Following Works: THE GOLD SICKLE; or, Hena the Virgin of the Isle of Sen. THE BRASS BELL; or, The Chariot of Death. THE IRON COLLAR; or, Faustine and Syomara. THE SILVER CROSS; or, The Carpenter of Nazareth. THE CASQUE'S LARK; or, Victoria, the Mother of the Camps. THE The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated 3 PONIARID'S HILT; or, Karadeucq and Ronan. THE BRANDING NEEDLE; or, The Monastery of Charolles. THE ABBATIAL CROSIER; or, Bonaik and Septimine. THE CARLOVINGIAN COINS; or, The Daughters of Charlemagne. THE IRON ARROW-HEAD; or, The Buckler Maiden. THE INFANT'S SKULL; or, The End of the World. THE PILGRIM'S SHELL; or, Fergan the Quarryman. THE IRON PINCERS; or, Mylio and Karvel. THE IRON TREVET; or Jocelyn the Champion. THE EXECUTIONER'S KNIFE; or, Joan of Arc. THE POCKET BIBLE; or, Christian the Printer. THE BLACKSMITH'S HAMMER; or, The Peasant Code. THE SWORD OF HONOR; or, The Foundation of the French Republic. THE GALLEY SLAVE'S RING; or, The Family Lebrenn. Published Uniform With This Volume By THE NEW YORK LABOR NEWS CO. 28 CITY HALL PLACE NEW YORK CITY * * * * * THE PONIARD'S HILT Or Karadeucq and Ronan A Tale of Bagauders and Vagres by EUGENE SUE Translated from the Original French by Daniel De Leon New York Labor News Company, 1907 Copyright, 1908, by the New York Labor News Co. The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated 4 INDEX. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 3 PART I. THE KORRIGANS. CHAP. I. ARAIM 9 II. FAIRIES AND HOBGOBLINS 15 III. HEVIN, THE PEDDLER 25 IV. OFF TO THE BAGAUDY! 37 PART II. THE VAGRES. CHAP. I. "WOLVES'-HEADS" 45 II. BISHOP AND COUNT 49 III. AT THE CHAPEL OF ST. LOUP 61 IV. THE DEMONS! THE DEMONS! 66 V. VAGRES IN JUDGMENT 71 VI. TO THE FASTNESS OF ALLANGE 85 VII. THE VAGRES AT FEAST 101 VIII. THE MIRACLE OF ST. MARTIN 107 IX. LOYSIK AND RONAN 114 X. THE MIRACLE OF ST. CAUTIN 129 The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated 5 PART III. THE BURG OF NEROWEG. CHAP. I. LEUDES AT HOME 139 II. THE MAHL 151 III. THE SPECTRE OF WISIGARDE 161 IV. THE LION OF POITIERS 170 V. IN THE TREASURE-CHAMBER 184 VI. THE BEAR OF MONT-DORE 194 VII. IN THE ERGASTULA 203 VIII. IN THE BANQUET HALL 211 IX. THE RESCUE 235 X. COUNT AND VAGRE 242 PART IV. GHILDE. CHAP. I. AT THE HEARTH OF JOEL 251 II. ON THE HILL NEAR MARCIGNY 258 III. THE DEATH OF CHRAM 272 EPILOGUE 281 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 The Poniard's Hilt, by Eugène Sue, Translated 6 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 Eugene 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 characters 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. 7 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, CHAPTER I. 8 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: "There will always be time for me to add a few lines to our family's narrative; besides, it seems to me, and I admit the notion is foolish, that to write 'I have lived', sounds very much like saying 'I am about to die'--Now, then, I am so happy that I cling to life, just as oysters do to their rocks." And so it came about that, from to-morrow to to-morrow, your great-grandfather reached his ninety-sixth year without increasing the history of our family with a single word. When he lay on his deathbed he said to me: "My child, I wish you to write the following lines for me in our archives: "'My grandfather Gildas and my father Goridek lived in our house quietly and happy, like good husbandmen; they remained true to their love for old Gaul and to the faith of our fathers; they blessed Hesus for having allowed them to be born and to die in the heart of Britanny, the only province where, for so very many years, the shocks that have elsewhere shaken Gaul have hardly ever been felt--those shocks died out before the impregnable frontiers of Breton Armorica, as the furious waves of our ocean dash themselves at the feet of our granite rocks.'" That, then, my son Jocelyn, is the reason why neither your grandfather Goridek nor his father wrote a line themselves. "And why," you will insist, "did you, Araim, my father, why did you wait so long, until you had a son and grandchildren, before you paid your tribute to our chronicle?" There are two reasons for that: the first is that I never had enough to say; the second is that I would have had too much to write.