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While it’s true that everyone is guilty of idolizing what they love, others like us, whose roots bind them to these pages, may find them insipid. But for us, isn’t this « Boucksken » or family booklet a panting piece of life that is unfolding? Two centuries of sorrows, joys, pettiness, greed, tenderness, ambitions, worries, filial piety? Didn’t all this deserve to be plucked from the dusty dungeons of a family library?
One fine day in the turbulent 16th century, Libert van der Dussen, Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, lord of Ath, lord of Bornival and alderman of Brussels, went into an obscure shop to buy a large notebook bound in fawn leather with iron gilding and embossed scrolls in red and green. No doubt he is obeying a powerful impulse in his blood: the need to survive and communicate with the world that will come after him. Perhaps he feels like throwing a bottle into the sea of time.
Of course, this is the moving concern of any memoirist, but it is particularly touching here, it seems to me, because Libert certainly has no pretensions to explaining his century or to shining with some dazzling literary virtue. He is interested in his own people, in his own flesh and blood, and the turbulent times in which he lived are only incidental to his interest.
Introduction by JK, then part one, in Old Flemish, followed by its translation into modern French
