A Descendant of Clovis

— A genealogical tree with its known roots in the fifth century of our era, and its branches still green in the nineteenth, is assuredly of more than family interest. To clear away the obscuring detritus and undergrowth of the ages from one such historic trunk was almost the last work of the regretted Lucien Faucou, who died in late November of 1894, when he was scarcely thirty-three years old. He was already director of the most curious of Paris museums, — and the one least known to tourists, — installed in the Hotel Carnavalet, which stands as it came from the hands of the Renaissance architects and decorators in the service of a noble Breton family. Here Madame de Sévigné lived and wrote immortal letters for the twenty years preceding her death ; and here, amid the relics of the history of Paris, to which the museum is devoted, the young director ferreted out the secrets of the past for his periodical, Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux.

The favored descendant of so many known ancestors (for all of us go back through the unknown in generations without number) is Count Albert de Mun. To the political world he is known as the most eloquent of French parliamentary orators since Gambetta. He was the first of the born Royalists to “ rally ” to the republic at the Pope’s bidding, and he has long been giving all his eloquence and labor to the formation of a Catholic workingmen’s party. He is personally acceptable even to the Socialists, toward whose doctrines he inclines in more ways than one. They will not take offense at his doubly royal descent, of which, I suspect, he himself had but a vague tradition until the recent publication. The literary world is sure to look on him with sympathetic interest because of his mother, Charlotte Ferron de la Ferronays, sister of the Olga whom the third sister, Pauline (the late Mrs. Augustus Craven), has enshrined in all hearts by her Récit d’une Sœur.

It is with the Muns that our genealogy of fourteen hundred years has to do. There is no difficulty in following them back through the eighteenth-century marquis and the governor of Toulouse, who was married in 1606, to the time of America’s discovery, when the head of the house was still in his seigneurie of Mun, close to Bigorre and its summer resorts in the Pyrenees. Hero, in 1488, Omer de Mun married Florette, of the blood of the Montlezuns, whose backward fortunes we must now follow. Her ancestor, five generations back in 1309, was Bernard, a younger son of one of the Comtes de Pardiac, who themselves reach up, in the year 1025, to the third son of that Comte d’Astarac who had his portion of territory as son of the Count of Gascony. All these are good Gascon names, from that borderland into which the Moors had more than once driven the remnant of the Goths and Basques of Spain.

Before the year 1000, the Counts of Gascony, lording it over a good part of what is now France, from the Bay of Biscay to Languedoc, numbered many a Garcia and Sanchez and Lupus. Charlemagne was of opinion that Loup II. was a veritable wolf, and so, in 778, ordered him to be hanged to a tree, — which, if it proves anything, goes to show the truth of the old saying, that all family lines can be traced back to the hangman’s knot.

It is more than probable, however, that the mighty Emperor of the West was on this occasion no better than an interested judge in his own cause. The Duke of Gascony, as he was then called, was in fact the last of the Merovingians, whose family had been dethroned by Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s grandfather ; and it was Loup II.’s grandfather, Waiffre, who lost all Aquitaine by fighting against Pepin and the French Revolution of his day. It is a curious though somewhat far-away revenge brought in by the whirligig of time that just as Leo III. then sanctioned the fait accompli and the new régime by crowning Charlemagne (on Christmas Day, 800) to the prejudice of the Gascon chiefs, so now, nearly eleven hundred years later, Leo XIII. sanctions the overthrow of the legal heirs of Charlemagne by encouraging the adherence to the republic of Adela of Gascony’s latest descendant.

Waiffre, Adela’s husband, was the greatgreat-grandson of Caribert, king of Aquitaine, and second son of Clotaire II., who was king of all France, and brother of the good King Dagobert himself. But he was also son of the wicked queen Fredegonde, who had his father Chilperic assassinated after setting him against his brothers Gontran and Sigebert, the latter the husband of her famous rival, Brunehaut. It is, perhaps, an additional virtue of the latter-day republic that although woman’s rights may in the end prevail in it, yet the single-handed energies of evil women can no longer upset the whole land, as they did from this first race of the French monarchs down to the latest Bourbons and Bonapartes.

The three brothers were the grandsons of the great Clovis, with whom this genealogy of a Christian gentleman of France might properly and gloriously end. Clovis, as he was the first Christian, was also the first of the Frankish chiefs to reign in that France to which they left its lasting name. It was in 794 that he drove the last Romans from Gaul ; they too had by this time received a barbarian for their emperor in the person of the Goth Theodoric. Clovis’s own pagan grandfather, Merovæus, after whom this whole line of kings was called, headed his savage tribes in the Belgian marshes round Tournay, whence they made their raids on the Saxons and Germans of the lower Rhine. These rivalries and enmities of race have remained through all the centuries until now.

This is truly royal and French ancestry of the Count de Man, which surpasses that of the Bourbons, who do not go back even to Charlemagne, is Strengthened by his being also, like them, a lineal descendant of King Louis XII. This is through his paternal grandmother, by the historic families of Ursel and Salm, by the Guises, and by Tasso’s protectors, the Estes of Ferrara. Renéé of France, who married Hercules d’Este, was supposed to have carried Calvinism into Italy. The Russian Orthodox ancestry of her Catholic descendant is known from Mrs. Craven’s story. In a very literal sense, there can be few to an equal degree “ heirof all the ages.”