| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through the the Google Books Library Project. See http://books.google.com/books?vid=MCYnAAAAMAAJ&id |
" " OR " "
A Tale of Druid Gaul
| ——By EUGENE SUE—— |
translated from the original french by
DANIEL DE LEON
new york labor news company, 1904
Copyright, 1904, by the
New York Labor News Company
The Gold Sickle; or, Hena the Virgin of the Isle of Sen, is theinitial story of the series that Eugene Sue wrote under the collectivetitle of The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a ProletarianFamily Across the Ages.
The scheme of this great work of Sue's was stupendously ambitious—andthe author did not fall below the ideal that he pursued. His was thepurpose of producing a comprehensive "universal history," dating fromthe beginning of the present era down to his own days. But the historythat he proposed to sketch was not to be a work for closet study. It wasto be a companion in the stream of actual, every-day life and struggle,with an eye especially to the successive struggles of the successivelyruled with the successively ruling classes. In the execution of hisdesign, Sue conceived a plan that was as brilliant as it waspoetic—withal profoundly philosophic. One family, the descendants of aGallic chief named Joel, typifies the oppressed; one family, thedescendants of a Frankish chief and conqueror named Neroweg, typifiesthe oppressor; and across and adown the ages, the successive strugglesbetween oppressors and oppressed—the history of civilization—is thusrepresented in a majestic allegory. In the execution of this superb plana thread was necessary to connect the several epochs with one another,to preserve the continuity requisite for historic accuracy, and, aboveall, to give unity and point to the silent lesson taught by theunfolding drama. Sue solved the problem by an ingenious scheme—a seriesof stories, supposedly written from age to age, sometimes at shorter,other times at longer intervals, by the descendants of the ancestraltype of the oppressed, narrating their special experience and handingthe supplemented chronicle down to their successors from gen