Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/46



T was around tlie year 1360 that two young Norman gentlemen, brothers, of the landed family Le Hardi or Le Hardy, gathered together their portable effects and sailed across the twenty-four-mile strait that separates the Island of Jersey from the French coast. What force it was that impelled them to leave their lovely Normandy and to migrate to the lonely Channel Isle, only forty-five square miles in area, it is difficult to determine at this date. Behind them in the Duchy they left some property and possessions, which were subsequently lost to their descendants by reason of their steady allegiance to the English crown in the wars and tumults which followed. One would like to think that they were enticed away from their inherited wealth and power by the poetic lure of the cliff-skirted birthplace of the mediaeval romancer Wace, that they were drawn irresistibly by the glitter of the Arthurian Legend. But one will never know.

The French branch of their family, at any rate, continued to flourish without them. Two centuries later the poetry in the Hardy blood seems to have flowered forth in Paris, when one Alexandre Hardy, author of six hundred plays, won the unofficial title of "Father of French Tragi-comedy."

Contemporary of Richelieu and