The snuffbox was given him by
the Emperor for having commanded the passage of the Rhine during the Ulm
campaign.
Achille Guynemer had two sons. The elder, Amedee, a graduate of the
Ecole polytechnique, died at the age of thirty and left no children. The
second, Auguste, was Sub-Prefect of Saverne under the Second Empire;
and, resigning this office after the war of 1870, he became
Vice-President of the society for the protection of Alsatians and
Lorrainers, the President of which was the Count d'Haussonville. He had
married a young Scottish lady, Miss Lyon, whose family included the
Earls of Strathmore, among whose titles were those of Glamis and Cawdor
mentioned by Shakespeare in "Macbeth."
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'Offemont_, 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.
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