The Gossip in Gavrillac
The simple folk of Brittany know what it means when a nobleman calls himself godfather to an unknown infant.
1921
© Pymouss, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Château La Chapelle-Chaussée, a seventeenth-century stately home some 14 miles northwest of Rennes in Brittany, might be a plausible likeness of the Count de Gavrillac’s ‘big grey house’. Gavrillac, Sabatini tells us, also lay a short distance to the west of Rennes, in a curve of the River Meu.
Introduction
Rafael Sabatini’s ‘Scaramouche’ is the tale of Andre-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer of no great convictions who becomes caught up in the French Revolution of 1789 through loyalty to a friend. The novel opens by placing Moreau against his family background — a difficult matter, though Breton gossip thinks it has got it all worked out.
HE was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.
His very paternity was obscure, although the village of Gavrillac had long since dispelled the cloud of mystery that hung about it. Those simple Brittany folk were not so simple as to be deceived by a pretended relationship which did not even possess the virtue of originality. When a nobleman, for no apparent reason, announces himself the godfather of an infant fetched no man knew whence, and thereafter cares for the lad’s rearing and education, the most unsophisticated of country folk perfectly understand the situation.
And so the good people of Gavrillac permitted themselves no illusions on the score of the real relationship between Andre-Louis Moreau — as the lad had been named — and Quintin de Kercadiou, Lord of Gavrillac, who dwelt in the big grey house that dominated from its eminence the village clustering below.
From ‘Scaramouche’ (1921), by Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950).
