Author Description

The tale of Bertrand du Guesclin's life and military service. This fable details several aspects of life from boyhood to adulthood as well as the battles and duties he served throughout his military career. Told in a story-like fable atmosphere, the reader gets easily and fully immersed in the almost mythological life of Bertrand du Guesclin. Sample Passage: Startling words, in truth, to hear from any one’s lips; and doubly so from those of a boy of fourteen, with his whole life before him. It was a clear, bright evening in the spring of 1334, and the setting sun was pouring a flood of golden glory over the wooded ridges, and dark moors, and wide green meadows, and quaint little villages of Bretagne, or Brittany, then a semi-independent principality ruled by its own duke, and little foreseeing that, barely two centuries later, it was to be united to France once for all. Over earth and sky brooded a deep, dreamy stillness of perfect repose, broken only by the lowing of cattle from the distant pastures, and the soft, sweet chime of the vesper-bell from the unseen church tower, hidden by the still uncleared wood, through one solitary gap in which were seen the massive grey battlements of Motte-Brun Castle, the residence of the local “seigneur,” or lord of the manor. A rabbit sat upright in its burrow to clean its furry face. A squirrel, halfway up the pillar-like stem of a tall tree, paused a moment to look down with its small, bright, restless eye; and a tiny bird, perched on a bough above, broke forth in a blithe carol. But the soothing influence of this universal peace brought no calm to the excited lad who was striding up and down a small open space in the heart of the wood, stamping fiercely ever and anon, and muttering, half aloud, words that seemed less like any connected utterance than like the almost unconscious bursting forth of thoughts too torturing to be controlled. “Is it my blame that I was born thus ill-favoured? Yet mine own father and mother gloom upo