"Well, my son," said Marik Lebrenn to Sacrovir, "in teaching you the Breton tongue I had above all in mind--obedient, moreover, to a tradition in our family, according to which it never forgot its mother tongue--to enable you to read these manuscripts." "Are they, then, written in the Breton tongue, father?" asked Velleda. "Yes, my children. The Breton tongue is none other than the Celtic or Gallic that was once spoken all over Gaul before the Roman and Frankish conquests. With the exception of a few changes that have taken place in the course of the centuries, it has preserved its purity in our Brittany, down to our own days. Of all the provinces of Gaul, Brittany was the last to submit to the Frankish Kings who issued from the conquest. Yes, let us never forget the proud and heroic motto of our fathers, conquered and despoiled though they were by the invader: _We still preserve our name, our tongue, our faith._ Now, then, my children, after two thousand years of struggles and strifes, our family has preserved its name, its tongue and its faith. We call ourselves _Lebrenn_, we speak Gallic, and I have raised you in the faith of our fathers, in the faith of the immortality of the soul and of the continuity of existence which enables us to look upon death as a change of habitation, nothing more--a sublime faith the morality of which, taught by the druids, was summed up in precepts like these: _Adore God; do no harm; exercise charity; he is pure and holy who performs celestial works and pure._ Fortunately, my children, we are not the only ones who preserved the sublime dogma of the continuity of life. Armand Barbès, one of the bravest militants of the democracy, when taken prisoner and subsequently condemned to death under the reign of Louis Philippe, awaited the hour of his execution with religious serenity of soul. The serenity which he preserved he drew from his faith in the perpetuity of life, a fundamental principle in our creed. I can do no better, my friends, than to read to you a page from the writings of Armand Barbès, the page which he dedicated to the memory of Godefroid Cavaignac, the publicist of the democracy, entitled: 'Two days of a death sentence.'" Lebrenn read: "It was the 12th of June, 1839. After four days' deliberation the Court of Peers notified me of its sentence. According to the usage in such cases, it was the registrar who brought me the sentence, and the honorable Cauchy thought it his duty to add to his message a little puff for the Roman Catholic and Apostolic religion. I answered him that I had my own religion and believed in God, but that that was no reason why I should be in need of the consolations of a priest, whosoever he might be. I requested him to be kind enough to inform his masters that I was ready to die, and that I only hoped that when their last hour approached their soul might be as tranquil as mine.