As we have already seen, only one of the four sons of the President of
Mayence--the hero of the Bidassoa--had left descendants. His son is M.
Paul Guynemer, former officer and historian of the _Cartulaire de
Royallieu_ and of the _Seigneurie d'Offémont_, whose only son was the
aviator. The race whose history is lost far back in the _Chanson de
Roland_ and the Crusades, which settled in Flanders, and then in
Brittany, but became, as soon as it left the provinces for the capital,
nomadic, changing its base at will from the garrison of the officer to
that of the official, seems to have narrowed and refined its stock and
condensed all the power of its past, all its hopes for the future, in
one last offshoot.

There are some plants, like the aloe, which bear but one flower, and
sometimes only at the end of a hundred years. They prepare their sap,
which has waited so long, and then from the heart of the plant issues a
long straight stem, like a tree whose regular branches look like forged
iron. At the top of this stem opens a marvelous flower, which is moist
and seems to drop tears upon the leaves, inviting them to share its
grief for the doom it awaits. When the flower is withered, the miracle
is never renewed.

Guynemer is the flower of an old French family. Like so many other
heroes, like so many peasants who, in this Great War, have been the
wheat of the nation, his own acts have proved his nobility. But the
fairy sent to preside at his birth laid in his cradle certain gilded
pages of the finest history in the world: Roland, the Crusades, Brittany
and Duguesclin, the Empire, and Alsace.