The journey to Anjou was made during the first months of the year 1034 and across a thousand vicissitudes, almost always accompanied by some pilgrims, or by beggars and vagabonds. Everywhere on their passage the traces were met of the horrible famine and not much less horrible ravages caused by the private feuds of the seigneurs. Little Jeannette perished on the road.
The narrative of my father, Yvon the Forester, breaks off here. He could not finish it. He was soon after taken sick and died. Before expiring he made to me the following confession which he desired inserted in the family's annals:
"I have a horrible confession to make. Near by the grave to which I took the body of Julyan, lay a large heap of wood that was to be reduced to coal by the woodsmen. My family was starving in the hut. I saw no way of prolonging their existence. The thought then occurred to me: 'Last night the abominable food that I carried to my family from Gregory's human charnel house kept them from dying in the agonies of starvation. My grandson is dead. What should I do? Bury the body of little Julyan or have it serve to prolong the life of those who gave him life?'
"After long hesitating before such frightful alternatives, the thought of the agonies that my family were enduring decided me. I lighted the heap of dried wood. I laid upon it the flesh of my grandson, and by the light cast from the pyre I buried his bones, except a fragment of his skull, which I preserved as a sad and solemn relic of those accursed days, and on which I engraved these fateful words in the Gallic tongue: _Fin-al-bred_--The End of the World. I then took the broiled pieces of meat to my expiring family!... You all ate in the dark.... You knew not what you ate.... The ghastly meal saved your lives!"
My father then delivered to me the parchment that contained his narrative, accompanied with the lettered bone from the skull of my poor little Julyan, and also the iron arrow-head which accompanied the narrative left by our ancestor Eidiol, the skipper of Paris. Some day, perhaps, these two narratives may be joined to the chronicle of our family, no doubt held by those of our relatives who must still be living in Britanny.