Finally, in the event that, having no children, you may be unable to transmit the plebeian legends of our family to your direct descendants, you shall bequeath them to one of the two surviving branches of our family. The first is that of the Renneponts, an ancestor of whom married at La Rochelle, towards the end of the Sixteenth Century, the daughter of Odelin the armorer, son of Christian the printer. I have had no news from the Rennepont branch of our family for many long years. You will have to inquire after it in La Rochelle, where, until the end of last century I knew them to reside. The other branch of our family is that of the Gerolsteins, sovereign Princes in Germany, and descendants of Gaëlo the pirate, the grandson of our ancestor Vortigern, who met our ancestor Eidiol, the dean of the Parisian skippers, in the Tenth Century, on the occasion of the siege of Paris by the Northmans. The Princes of Gerolstein continue to reign in Germany, and have remained faithful to the Protestant religion since the time when it was embraced by Prince Charles of Gerolstein, who was the friend of Coligny, and whose son fought at the battle of Roche-la-Belle by the side of our ancestor Odelin, the armorer of La Rochelle. Either to the Gerolsteins or the Renneponts our family archives and relics will be left by you, in the event of your not living onward in your posterity. Along with these legends, I bequeath to you and your descendants our family hatred for the Church and for Royalty. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [1] All attribute to themselves the glory of success; reverses they impute to only one. [2] The above details of the torture of Cornelius De Witt, who had the fortitude to recite this strophe in the midst of atrocious sufferings, are scrupulously exact. See Basnage, _History of the United Provinces_, vol. II, p. 171. [3] For letters written by eye-witnesses of these atrocities, see Basnage, _History of the United Provinces; Events of the Campaign of 1672_, published at The Hague, 1675: _The Cry of the Martyrs_, published in the same city, 1673; etc., etc. [4] It is simply impossible to give the shocking details of their disfigurement. [5] Facts like these would seem incredible by their savage barbarity, did not authentic witnesses confirm them, almost daily, under the reign of the Grand Monarch. "The military constraint arrived in the town to the sound of bell and drum; then was furnished the melancholy spectacle of the house being demolished, the stones, the beams, the lumber, the iron publicly sold, because the owner had failed to pay his tax, etc., etc."--_Vauban, La Dime Royale_, vol. 1, chap. X. See also the _New Code of Taxes_, or the _Collected Ordinances_, Paris, 1761, article on Military Constraints; Forbonnais, _Researches in Finance, etc._ [6] Even at the end of the Eighteenth Century women among the nobility still often wore masks, especially in the country, to preserve the freshness of their color from the tan.