The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories (49 page)

At first I did not realize all this; but suddenly the thought that, if I had gone the year before, Catharine would be there, praying and asking me of God, fell like a bolt on my heart, and I felt all my body tremble.

“Let us go! let us go!” I exclaimed, “this is terrible.”

“What is?” he asked.

“War.”

We descended the stairs under the great gate, and I went across the court to the house of Monsieur the Commandant Meunier, while Brainstein took the way to his house.

At the corner of the Hotel de Ville, I saw a sight which I shall remember all my life. There, around a placard, were more than five hundred people, men and women crowded against each other, all pale, and with necks outstretched, gazing at it as at some horrible apparition. They could not read it, and from time to time one would say in German or French:

“But they are not all dead! Some will return.”

Others cried out:

“Let us see it! let us get near it.”

A poor old woman in the rear lifted up her hands, and cried:

“Christopher! my poor Christopher!”

Others, angry at her clamor, called out:

“Keep that old woman quiet.”

Each one thought only of himself.

Behind, the crowd continued to pour through the German gate.

At length, Harmantier, the
sergent-de-ville
, came out of the guard-house, and stood at the top of the steps, with another placard like the first; a few soldiers followed him. Then a rush was made toward him, but the soldiers kept off the crowd, and old Harmantier began to read the placard, which he called the twenty-ninth bulletin, and in which the Emperor informed them that during the retreat the horses perished every night by thousands. He said nothing of the men!

The
sergent-de-ville
read slowly; not a breath was heard in the crowd; even the old woman, who did not understand French, listened like the others. The buzz of a fly could have been heard. But when he came to this passage, “Our cavalry was dismounted to such an extent that we were forced to bring together the officers who yet owned horses to form four companies of one hundred and fifty men each. Generals rated as captains, and colonels as under-officers”—when he read this passage, which told more of the misery of the grand army than all the rest, cries and groans arose on all sides; two or three women fell and were carried away.

It is true that the bulletin added, “The health of his majesty was never better,” and that was a great consolation. Unfortunately it could not restore life to three hundred thousand men buried in the snow; and so the people went away very sad. Others came by dozens who had not heard the news read, and from time to time Harmantier came out to read the bulletin.

This lasted until night; still the same scene over and over again.

I ran from the place; I wanted to know nothing about it.

I went to Monsieur the Commandant’s. Entering a parlor, I saw him at breakfast. He was an old man, but hale, with a red face and good appetite.

“Ah! it is you!” said he, “Monsieur Goulden is not coming, then?”

“No, Monsieur the Commandant, the bad news has made him ill.”

“Ah! I understand,” he said, emptying his glass; “yes, it is unfortunate.”

And while I was regulating the clock, he added:

“Well! tell Monsieur Goulden that we will have our revenge. We cannot always have the upper hand. For fifteen years we have kept the drums beating over them, and it is only right to let them have this little morsel of consolation. And then our honor is safe; we were not beaten fighting; without the cold and the snow, those poor Cossacks would have had a hard time of it. But patience; the skeletons of our regiments will soon be filled, and then let them beware.”

I wound up the clock; he rose and came to look at it, for he was a great amateur in clock-making. He pinched my ear in a merry mood; and then, as I was going away, he cried as he buttoned up his overcoat, which he had opened before beginning breakfast:

“Tell Father Goulden to rest easy; the dance will begin again in the spring; the Kalmucks will not always have winter fighting for them. Tell him that.”

“Yes, Monsieur the Commandant,” I answered, shutting the door.

His burly figure and air of good humor comforted me a little; but in all the other houses I went to, at the Horwiches, the Frantz-Tonis, the Durlaches, everywhere I heard only lamentations. The women especially were in misery; the men said nothing, but walked about with heads hanging down, and without even looking to see what I was doing.

Toward ten o’clock there only remained two persons for me to see: Monsieur de la Vablerie-Chamberlan, one of the ancient nobility, who lived at the end of the main street, with Madame Chamberlan-d’Ecof and Mademoiselle Jeanne, their daughter. They were
émigrés
, and had returned about three or four years before. They saw no one in the city, and only three or four old priests in the environs. Monsieur de la Vablerie-Chamberlan loved only the chase. He had six dogs at the end of the yard, and a two-horse carriage; Father Robert, of the Rue des Capucins, served them as coachman, groom, footman, and huntsman. Monsieur de la Vablerie-Chamberlan always wore a hunting vest, a leathern cap, and boots and spurs. All the town called him the hunter, but they said nothing of Madame nor of Mademoiselle de Chamberlan.

I was very sad when I pushed open the heavy door, which closed with a pulley whose creaking echoed through the vestibule. What was then my surprise to hear, in the midst of general mourning, the tones of a song and harpsichord! Monsieur de la Vablerie was singing, and Mademoiselle Jeanne accompanying him. I knew not, in those days, that the misfortune of one was often the joy of others, and I said to myself with my hand on the latch: “They have not heard the news from Russia.”

But while I stood thus, the door of the kitchen opened, and Mademoiselle Louise, their servant, putting out her head, asked:

“Who is there?”

“It is I, Mademoiselle Louise.”

“Ah! it is you, Monsieur Joseph. Come this way.”

They had their clock in a large parlor which they rarely entered; the high windows, with blinds, remained closed; but there was light enough for what I had to do. I passed then through the kitchen and regulated the antique clock, which was a magnificent piece of work of white marble. Mademoiselle Louise looked on.

“You have company, Mademoiselle Louise?” said I.

“No, but monsieur ordered me to let no one in.”

“You are very cheerful here.”

“Ah! yes,” she said; “and it is for the first time in years; I don’t know what is the matter.”

My work done, I left the house, meditating on these occurrences, which seemed to me strange. The idea never entered my mind that they were rejoicing at our defeat.

Then I turned the corner of the street to go to Father Féral’s, who was called the “Standard-bearer,” because, at the age of forty-five, he, a blacksmith, and for many years the father of a family, had carried the colors of the volunteers of Phalsbourg in ‘92, and only returned after the Zurich campaign. He had his three sons in the army of Russia, Jean, Louis, and George Féral. George was commandant of dragoons; the two others, officers of infantry.

I imagined the grief of Father Féral while I was going, but it was nothing to what I saw when I entered his room. The poor old man, blind and bald, was sitting in an arm-chair behind the stove, his head bowed upon his breast, and his sightless eyes open, and staring as if he saw his three sons stretched at his feet. He did not speak, but great drops of sweat rolled down his forehead on his long, thin cheeks, while his face was pale as that of a corpse. Four or five of his old comrades of the times of the Republic—Father Desmarets, Father Nivoi, old Paradis, and tall old Froissard—had come to console him. They sat around him in silence, smoking their pipes, and looking as if they themselves needed comfort.

From time to time one or the other would say: “Come, come, Féral! are we no longer veterans of the army of the Sambre-and-Meuse?”

Or,

“Courage, Standard-bearer: courage! Did we not carry the battery at Fleurus?”

Or some other similar remark.

But he did not reply; every minute he sighed, his aged, hollow cheeks swelled; then he leaned over, and the old friends made signs to each other, shaking their heads, as if to say:

“This looks bad.”

I hastened to regulate the clock and depart, for to see the poor old man in such a plight made my heart bleed.

When I arrived at home, I found Monsieur Goulden at his work-bench.

“You are returned, Joseph,” said he. “Well?”

“Well, Monsieur Goulden, you had reason to stay away; it is terrible.”

And I told him all in detail.

“Yes; I knew it all,” said he, sadly, “but our misfortunes are only beginning; these Prussians and Austrians and Russians and Spaniards—all the nations we have been beating since eighteen hundred and four, are now taking advantage of our ill luck to fall upon us. We gave them kings and queens they did not know from Adam nor Eve, and whom they did not want, it seems, and now they are going to bring back the old ones with all their trains of nobles, and after pouring out our blood for the Emperor’s brothers, we are about losing all we gained by the Revolution. Instead of being first among the first we will be last among the last. While you were away I was thinking of all this; it is unavoidable—We relied upon soldiers alone, and now that we have no more, we are nothing.”

He arose. I set the table, and, whilst we were dining in silence, the bells of the steeples began to ring.

“Some one is dead in the city,” said Monsieur Goulden.

“Indeed? I did not hear of it.”

Ten minutes after, the Rabbi Rose came in to have a glass put in his watch.

“Who is dead?” asked Monsieur Goulden.

“Poor old Standard-bearer.”

“What! Father Féral?”

“Yes, near an hour ago. Father Desmarets and several others tried to comfort him; at last he asked them to read to him the last letter of his son George, the commandant of dragoons, in which he says that next spring he hoped to embrace his father with a colonel’s epaulettes. As the old man heard this, he tried to rise, but fell back with his head upon his knees. That letter had broken his heart.”

Monsieur Goulden made no remark on the news.

“Here is your watch, Monsieur Rose,” said he, handing it back to the rabbi; “it is twelve sous.”

Monsieur Rose departed, and we finished our dinner in silence.

CHAPTER V

A few days after, the gazette announced that the Emperor was in Paris, and that the King of Rome and the Empress Marie-Louise were about to be crowned. Monsieur the Mayor, his coadjutor and the municipal councillors now spoke only of the rights of the throne, and Professor Burguet, the elder, wrote a speech on the subject which Baron Parmentier read. But all this produced but little effect on the people, because every one was afraid of being carried off by the conscription, and knew that many more soldiers were needed; all were in trouble, and I grew thinner day by day. In vain would Monsieur Goulden say: “Fear nothing, Joseph; you cannot march. Consider, my child, that any one as lame as you would give out at the end of the first mile.”

But all this did not lessen my uneasiness.

Monsieur Goulden, often, too, when we were alone at work, would say to me:

“If those who are now masters, and who tell us that God placed them here on earth to make us happy, would foresee at the beginning of a campaign the poor old men, the hapless mothers, whose very hearts they have torn away to satisfy their pride—if they could see the tears and hear the groans of these poor people when they are coldly told ‘Your son is dead; you will see him no more; he perished, crushed by horses’ hoofs, or torn to pieces by a cannon-ball, or died mayhap afar off in a hospital, after having his arm or leg cut off,—burning with fever, without one kind word to console him, but calling for his parents as when he was an infant,’—if, I say, these haughty ones of earth could thus see the tears of those mothers, I do not believe that one among them would be barbarous enough to continue the war. But they think nothing of this; they think other folks do not love their children as they love theirs; they think people are no more than beasts. They are wrong; all their great genius, their lofty notions of glory, are as nothing, for there is only one thing for which a people should fly to arms—men, women, children—old and young. It is when their liberty is assailed as ours was in ‘92—then all should die or conquer together; he who remains behind is a coward, who would have others fight for him;—the victory then is not for a few, but for all;—then sons and fathers are defending their families; if they are killed, it is a misfortune, to be sure, but they die for their rights. Such a man, Joseph, is the only just one, the one of which no one can complain; all others are shameful, and the glory they bring is not glory fit for a man, but only for a wild beast.”

On the eighth of January, a huge placard was posted on the town-hall, stating that the Emperor would levy, after a
senatus-consultus
, as they said in those days, in the first place, one hundred and fifty thousand conscripts of 1813; then one hundred
cohortes
of the first call of 1812 who thought they had already escaped; then one hundred thousand conscripts of from 1809 to 1812, and so on to the end; so that every loop-hole was closed, and we would have a larger army than before the Russian expedition.