The bard began. I listened, all attention and eagerness, trying to catch every sound and to impress every word upon my excellent memory. In a pompous introduction he told us all about the first arrival of the Celts in Europe, the coming of the Druids as apostles of the true faith; he told us how a great colony of Salic Franks, Gauls, under the collective name of Pelasgi, all children of Teut, or Teutons, had first planted a sacred oak at Dodona. On this point I was already well informed. He then alluded to the building up of Athens, due as much to the Teutons as to the {087}Greeks of Cecrops; he boasted, that when the Greeks were led astray by their corrupt imagination and wished to raise altars to Saturn, Jupiter, and all those false gods whom they had borrowed from the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, the Teutons rose in the name of outraged human reason, and proclaimed the only one God, breaking down all the false altars. Hence, he said, that formidable struggle, still so well known as the battle of the gods of Olympus against the _Teutons_ or _Titans_.... I held my breath. What? Those terrible giants, those colossal men, whom Jupiter himself feared and who piled Ossa upon Pelion, or Pelion upon Ossa--they were Celts? They were the ancestors of the brave French? O Titans, O my brothers, with what delight I listened to the sacred words of the bard, so that I might repeat them to you and rejoice with you in our glorious descent! By special grace I understood the Germano-Celtic words of the bard without difficulty. But the poem was flowing on interminably; I began to mistrust my memory. Centuries succeeded centuries, events followed events, and they were as close to each other and as numerous as grains in a bag of wheat. The continuous exertion of all my faculties began to tell upon me. The most illustrious {088}heroes of Gaul and of Germany appeared to me soon only like the faint forms seen by means of a magic lantern; Sigovesus and Bellovesus, the descendants of the great king Ambigat; Brennus, Btlgius, and Lutharius, sons or sons-in-law of that other great king Cambaules, began to turn around and arouad in my head, holding each other by the hand and performing an old British dance to the music of an old Breton instrument. Ariovistus played on the biniou. Then the sounds of the biniou, the shrill tones of the fife and the Druid harp were broken in upon by a terrible noise of countless church bells; the air shook all of a sudden, the earth trembled, everything around me fell to the ground with a great crash, the Druid, the house of the wedding, the trap-door, the hamlet, the trees, the hill, the Rhine and its banks, the heaven and the stars, all disappeared at the same moment, and I awoke in my arm-chair, surrounded by my poor books, which had just fallen from my knees. The dinner bell was still ringing. [Illustration: 111] IV.