The Luck of Barry Lyndon E-Book

William Makepeace Thackeray

• Herausgeber: Passerino Editore
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

"The Luck of Barry Lyndon" is a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in serial form in 1844, about a member of the Irish gentry trying to become a member of the English aristocracy. Thackeray, who based the novel on the life and exploits of the Anglo-Irish rake and fortune-hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney, later reissued it under the title The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon.Stanley Kubrick later adapted the novel into the movie Barry Lyndon (1975). William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century.

Leseprobe

William Makepeace Thackeray

The Sky is the limit

ISBN: 9788899617417

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Table of contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

Credits

WILLIAM M. THACKERAY

The Luck of Barry Lyndon

THE MEMOIRS OF

BARRY LYNDON, ESQ.,

OF THE KINGDOM OF IRELAND.

CONTAINING

AN ACCOUNT OF HIS EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES; MISFORTUNES; 

HIS SUFFERINGS IN THE SERVICE OF HIS LATE PRUSSIAN MAJESTY;

HIS VISITS TO MANY OF THE COURTS OF EUROPE;

HIS MARRIAGE AND SPLENDID ESTABLISHMENTS IN

ENGLAND AND IRELAND; AND THE MANY

CRUEL PERSECUTIONS, CONSPIRACIES,

AND SLANDERS OF WHICH HE

HAS BEEN A VICTIM.

CHAPTER I

MY PEDIGREE AND FAMILY – UNDERGO THE INFLUENCE OF THE TENDER PASSION

Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it. Ever since ours was a family (and that must be very near Adam’s time, – so old, noble, and illustrious are the Barrys, as everybody knows), women have played a mighty part with the destinies of our race.

I presume that there is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of the house of Barry of Barryogue, of the kingdom of Ireland, than which a more famous name is not to be found in Gwillim or D’Hozier; and though as a man of the world I have learned to despise heartily the claims of some pretenders to high birth who have no more genealogy than the lackey who cleans my boots, and though I laugh to utter scorn the boasting of many of my countrymen, who are all for descending from kings of Ireland, and talk of a domain no bigger than would feed a pig as if it were a principality; yet truth compels me to assert that my family was the noblest of the island, and, perhaps, of the universal world; while their possessions, now insignificant, and torn from us by war, by treachery, by the loss of time, by ancestral extravagance, by adhesion to the old faith and monarch, were formerly prodigious, and embraced many counties, at a time when Ireland was vastly more prosperous than now. I would assume the Irish crown over my coat-of-arms, but that there are so many silly pretenders to that distinction who bear it and render it common.

Who knows, but for the fault of a woman, I might have been wearing it now? You start with incredulity. I say, why not? Had there been a gallant chief to lead my countrymen, instead of puling knaves who bent the knee to King Richard II, they might have been freemen; had there been a resolute leader to meet the murderous ruffian, Oliver Cromwell, we should have shaken off the English for ever. But there was no Barry in the field against the usurper; on the contrary, my ancestor, Simon de Bary, came over with the first-named monarch, and married the daughter of the then King of Munster, whose sons in battle he pitilessly slew.

In Oliver’s time it was too late for a chief of the name of Barry to lift up his war-cry against that of the murderous brewer. We were princes of the land no longer; our unhappy race had lost its possessions a century previously, and by the most shameful treason. This I know to be the fact, for my mother has often told me the story, and besides had worked it in a worsted pedigree which hung up in the yellow saloon at Barryville where we lived.

That very estate which the Lyndons now possess in Ireland was once the property of my race. Rory Barry of Barryogue owned it in Elizabeth’s time, and half Munster beside. The Barry was always in feud with the O’Mahonys in those times; and, as it happened, a certain English colonel passed through the former’s country with a body of men-at-arms, on the very day when the O’Mahonys had made an inroad upon our territories, and carried off a frightful plunder of our flocks and herds.

This young Englishman, whose name was Roger Lyndon, Linden, or Lyndaine, having been most hospitably received by the Barry, and finding him just on the point of carrying an inroad into the O’Mahony’s land, offered the aid of himself and his lances, and behaved himself so well, as it appeared, that the O’Mahonys were entirely overcome, all the Barrys’ property restored, and with it, says the old chronicle, twice as much of the O’Mahonys’ goods and cattle.

It was the setting-in of the winter season, and the young soldier was pressed by the Barry not to quit his house of Barryogue, and remained there during several months, his men being quartered with Barry’s own gallowglasses, man by man, in the cottages round about. They conducted themselves, as is their wont, with the most intolerable insolence towards the Irish; so much so, that fights and murders continually ensued, and the people vowed to destroy them.

The Barry’s son (from whom I descend) was as hostile to the English as any other man on his domain; and, as they would not go when bidden, he and his friends consulted together and determined on destroying these English to a man.