Les Misérables, v. 2/5: Cosette
by Victor Hugo · English · Gutenberg #48732 · 563,618 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Les Misérables, v. 2/5: Cosette
Author: Victor Hugo
Translator: Sir Lascelles Wraxall
Release date: April 18, 2015 [eBook #48732]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48732
Credits: Produced by Laura Natal, Ingrid González Reyes & Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Hathi Trust.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISÉRABLES, V. 2/5: COSETTE ***
LES MISÉRABLES.
BY
VICTOR HUGO.
PART SECOND.
COSETTE.
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY SIR LASCELLES WRAXALL.
BOSTON:
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
1887.
[Illustration: FAUCHELEVENT AND THE GRAVE-DIGGER.]
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
COSETTE.
BOOK I.
WATERLOO.
I. ON THE NIVELLES ROAD
II. HOUGOMONT
III. JUNE 18, 1815
IV. A
V. THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES
VI. FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
VII. NAPOLEON IN GOOD HUMOR
VIII. THE EMPEROR ASKS THE GUIDE A QUESTION
IX. A SURPRISE
X. THE PLATEAU OF MONT ST. JEAN
XI. BÜLOW TO THE RESCUE
XII. THE GUARD
XIII. THE CATASTROPHE
XIV. THE LAST SQUARE
XV. CAMBRONNE
XVI. QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE
XVII. OUGHT WATERLOO TO BE APPLAUDED?
XVIII. RESTORATION OF DIVINE RIGHTÉ
XIX. THE BATTLE-FIELD BY NIGHT
BOOK II.
THE SHIP "ORION."
I. NO. 24,601 BECOMES NO. 9430
II. TWO LINES OF A DOUBTFUL ORIGIN
III. ON BOARD THE "ORION"
BOOK III.
THE PROMISE TO THE DEAD FULFILLED.
I. THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL
II. TWO FULL-LENGTH PORTRAITS
III. MEN WANT WINE AND HORSES WATER
IV. A DOLL COMES ON THE STAGE
V. THE LITTLE ONE ALONE
VI. BOULATRUELLE MAY HAVE BEEN RIGHT
VII. COSETTE IN THE DARK WITH THE STRANGER
VIII. IS HE RICH OR POOR?
IX. THÉNARDIER AT WORK
X. THÉNARDIER HAS ONE REGRET
XI. NO. 9430 REAPPEARS, AND COSETTE WINS IT IN THE LOTTERY
BOOK IV.
THE GORBEAU TENEMENT.
I. MASTER GORBEAU
II. THE NEST OF AN OWL AND A LINNET
III. TWO EVILS MAKE A GOOD
IV. THE REMARKS OF THE CHIEF LODGER
V. NOISE MADE BY A FALLING FIVE-FRANC PIECE
BOOK V.
FOR A STILL HUNT A DUMB PACK.
I. STRATEGIC ZIGZAGS
II. IT IS FORTUNATE THAT THE BRIDGE OF AUSTERLITZ WILL CARRY WAGONS
III. CONSULT THE PLAN OF PARIS IN 1727
IV. ATTEMPTS TO ESCAPE
V. A THING IMPOSSIBLE IN GASLIGHT
VI. THE BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA
VII. CONTINUATION OF THE ENIGMA
VIII. THE ENIGMA INCREASES
IX. THE MAN WITH THE BELL
X. HOW JAVERT ONLY FOUND THE NEST
BOOK VI.
PETIT PICPUS.
I. NO. 62, RUE PICPUS
II. THE OBEDIENCE OF MARTIN VERGA
III. SEVERITIES
IV. GAYETIES
V. AMUSEMENTS
VI. THE LITTLE CONVENT
VII. A FEW PROFILES FROM THE SHADOW
VIII. POST CORDA LAPIDES
IX. A CENTURY UNDER A WIMPLE
X. ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION
XI. THE END OF LITTLE PICPUS
BOOK VII.
A PARENTHESIS.
I. THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA
II. THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT
III. ON WHAT TERMS THE PAST IS VENERABLE
IV. THE CONVENT FROM THE MORAL STANDPOINT
V. PRAYER
VI. ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER
VII. CARE TO BE EXERCISED IN CONDEMNING
VIII. FAITH, LAW
BOOK VIII.
CEMETERIES TAKE WHAT IS GIVEN THEM.
I. HOW TO GET INTO A CONVENT
II. FAUCHELEVENT FACES THE DIFFICULTY
III. MOTHER INNOCENT
IV. A PLAN OF ESCAPE
V. A DRUNKARD IS NOT IMMORTAL
VI. BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS
VII. FAUCHELEVENT HAS AN IDEA
VIII. A SUCCESSFUL EXAMINATION
IX. IN THE CONVENT
ILLUSTRATIONS.
FAUCHELEVENT AND THE GRAVE-DIGGER, Vol. II. Frontispiece
Drawn by G. Jeanniot.
"SHE GLIDED ALONG RATHER THAN WALKED"
Drawn by G. Jeanniot.
BOOK I.
WATERLOO.
CHAPTER I.
ON THE NIVELLES ROAD.
On a fine May morning last year (1861) a wayfarer, the person who
is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles, and was proceeding
toward La Hulpe. He was on foot and following, between two rows of
trees, a wide paved road which undulates over a constant succession
of hills, that raise the road and let it fall again, and form, as it
were, enormous waves. He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur Isaac,
and noticed in the west the slate-covered steeple of Braine l'Alleud,
which looks like an overturned vase. He had just left behind him a wood
upon a hill, and at the angle of a cross-road, by the side of a sort of
worm-eaten gallows which bore the inscription, "Old barrier, No. 4," a
wine-shop, having on its front the following notice: "The Four Winds,
Échabeau, private coffee-house."
About half a mile beyond this pot-house, he reached a small valley,
in which there is a stream that runs through an arch formed in the
causeway. The clump of trees, wide-spread but very green, which fills
the valley on one side of the road, is scattered on the other over the
fields, and runs gracefully and capriciously toward Braine l'Alleud.
On the right, and skirting the road, were an inn, a four-wheeled cart
in front of the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a pile
of dry shrubs near a quick-set hedge, lime smoking in a square hole,
and a ladder lying along an old shed with straw partitions. A girl
was hoeing in a field, where a large yellow bill--probably of a show
at some Kermesse--was flying in the wind. At the corner of the inn, a
badly-paved path ran into the bushes by the side of a pond, on which a
flotilla of ducks was navigating. The wayfarer turned into this path.
After proceeding about one hundred yards, along a wall of the 15th
century, surmounted by a coping of crossed bricks, he found himself in
front of a large arched stone gate, with a rectangular moulding, in the
stern style of Louis XIV., supported by two flat medallions. A severe
façade was over this gate; a wall perpendicular to the façade almost
joined the gate and flanked it at a right angle. On the grass-plat in
front of the gate lay three harrows, through which the May flowers
were growing pell-mell. The gate was closed by means of two decrepit
folding-doors, ornamented by an old rusty hammer.
The sun was delightful, and the branches made that gentle May rustling,
which seems to come from nests even more than from the wind. A little
bird, probably in love, was singing with all its might. The wayfarer
stooped and looked at a rather large circular excavation in the stone
to the right of the gate, which resembled a sphere. At this moment the
gates opened and a peasant woman came out. She saw the wayfarer and
noticed what he was looking at.
"It was a French cannon-ball that made it," she said, and then added:
"What you see higher up there, on the gate near a nail, is the hole of
a heavy shell, which did not penetrate the wood."
"What is the name of this place?" the wayfarer asked.
"Hougomont," said the woman.
The wayfarer drew himself up, he walked a few steps, and then looked
over the hedge. He could see on the horizon through the trees a species
of mound, and on this mound something which, at a distance, resembled a
lion. He was on the battlefield of Waterloo.
CHAPTER II.
HOUGOMONT.
Hougomont was a mournful spot, the beginning of the obstacle, the
first resistance which that great woodman of Europe, called Napoleon,
encountered at Waterloo; the first knot under the axe-blade. It was
a château, and is now but a farm. For the antiquarian Hougomont is
Hugo-mons: it was built by Hugo, Sire de Sommeril, the same who endowed
the sixth chapelry of the Abbey of Villers. The wayfarer pushed open
the door, elbowed an old carriage under a porch, and entered the yard.
The first thing that struck him in this enclosure was a gate of the
16th century, which now resembles an arcade, as all has fallen around
it. A monumental aspect frequently springs up from ruins. Near the
arcade there is another gateway in the wall, with key-stones in the
style of Henri IV., through which can be seen the trees of an orchard.
By the side of this gateway a dung-hill, mattocks, and shovels, a few
carts, an old well with its stone slab and iron windlass, a frisking
colt, a turkey displaying its tail, a chapel surmounted by a little
belfry, and a blossoming pear-tree growing in _espalier_ along the
chapel wall,--such is this yard, the conquest of which was a dream
of Napoleon's. This nook of earth, had he been able to take it, would
probably have given him the world. Chickens are scattering the dust
there with their beaks, and you hear a growl,--it is a large dog, which
shows its teeth and fills the place of the English. The English did
wonders here; Cooke's four companies of Guards resisted at this spot
for seven hours the obstinate attack of an army.
Hougomont, seen on a map, buildings and enclosures included, presents
an irregular quadrangle, of which one angle has been broken off. In
this angle is the southern gate within point-blank range of this
wall. Hougomont has two gates,--the southern one which belongs to
the château, and the northern which belongs to the farm. Napoleon
sent against Hougomont his brother Jérôme; Guilleminot's, Foy's, and
Bachelie's divisions were hurled at it; nearly the whole of Reille's
corps was employed there and failed; and Kellermann's cannon-balls
rebounded from this heroic wall. Bauduin's brigade was not strong
enough to force Hougomont on the north, and Soye's brigade could only
attack it on the south without carrying it.
The farm-buildings border the court-yard on the south, and a piece
of the northern gate, broken by the French, hangs from the wall. It
consists of four planks nailed on two cross-beams, and the scars of the
attack may still be distinguished upon it. The northern gate, which
was broken down by the French, and in which a piece has been let in
to replace the panel hanging to the wall, stands, half open, at the
extremity of the yard; it is cut square in a wall which is stone at
the bottom, brick at the top, and which closes the yard on the north
side. It is a simple gate, such as may be seen in all farm-yards, with
two large folding-doors made of rustic planks; beyond it are fields.
The dispute for this entrance was furious; for a long time all sorts
of marks of bloody hands could be seen on the side-post of the gate,
and it was here that Bauduin fell. The storm of the fight still lurks
in the court-yard: horror is visible there; the incidents of the
fearful struggle are petrified in it; people are living and dying in
it,--it was only yesterday. The walls are in the pangs of death, the
stones fall, the breaches cry out, the holes are wounds, the bent and
quivering trees seem making an effort to fly.
This yard was more built upon in 1815 than it is now; buildings which
have since been removed, formed in it redans and angles. The English
barricaded themselves in it; the French penetrated, but could not hold
their ground there. By the side of the chapel stands a wing of the
château, the sole relic left of the Manor of Hougomont, in ruins; we
might almost say gutted. The château was employed as a keep, the chapel
served as a block-house. Men exterminated each other there. The French,
fired upon from all sides, from behind walls, from granaries, from
cellars, from every window, from every air-hole, from every crack in
the stone, brought up fascines, and set fire to the walls and men; the
musketry fire was replied to by arson.
In the ruined wing you can look through windows defended by iron bars,
into the dismantled rooms of a brick building; the English Guards were
ambuscaded in these rooms, and the spiral staircase, hollowed out from
ground-floor to roof, appears like the interior of a broken shell. The
staircase has two landings; the English, besieged on this landing and
massed on the upper stairs, broke away the lowest. They are large slabs
of blue stone which form a pile among the nettles. A dozen steps still
hold to the wall; on the first the image of a trident is carved, and
these inaccessible steps are solidly set in their bed. All the rest
resemble a toothless jaw. There are two trees here, one of them dead,
and the other, which was wounded at the root, grows green again in
April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the staircase.
Men massacred each other in the chapel, and the interior, which is
grown quiet again, is strange. Mass has not been said in it since
the carnage, but the altar has been left,--an altar of coarse wood
supported by a foundation of rough stone. Four whitewashed walls, a
door opposite the altar, two small arched windows, a large wooden
crucifix over the door, above the crucifix a square air-hole stopped
up with hay; in a corner, on the ground, an old window sash, with the
panes all broken,--such is the chapel. Near the altar is a wooden
statue of St. Anne, belonging to the 15th century; the head of the
infant Saviour has been carried away by a shot. The French, masters for
a moment of the chapel and then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames
filled the building, and it became a furnace; the door burned, the
flooring burned, but the wooden Christ was not burned; the fire nibbled
away the feet, of which only the blackened stumps can now be seen, and
then stopped. It was a miracle, say the country people. The walls are
covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ you read the name
Henquinez; then these others, Conde de Rio Maïor, Marquis y Marquisa
de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with marks of admiration,
signs of anger. The wall was whitewashed again in 1849, for the nations
insulted each other upon it. It was at the door of this chapel that
a body was picked up, holding an axe in its hand; it was the body of
Sub-lieutenant Legros.
On leaving the chapel you see a well on your left hand. As there are
two wells in this yard, you ask yourself why this one has no bucket
and windlass? Because water is no longer drawn from it. Why is it not
drawn? Because it is full of skeletons. The last man who drew water
from this well was a man called William van Kylsom: he was a peasant
who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener there. On June 18, 1815, his
family took to flight and concealed themselves in the woods. The forest
round the Abbey of Villers sheltered for several days and nights the
dispersed luckless country people. Even at the present day certain
vestiges, such as old burnt trunks of trees, mark the spot of these
poor encampments among the thickets. Van Kylsom remained at Hougomont
to "take care of the château," and concealed himself in a cellar. The
English discovered him there; he was dragged from his lurking-place,
and the frightened man was forced by blows with the flat of a sabre
to wait on the combatants. They were thirsty, and he brought them
drink, and it was from this well he drew the water. Many drank there
for the last time, and this well, from which so many dead men drank,
was destined to die too. After the action, the corpses were hastily
interred; death has a way of its own of harassing victory, and it
causes pestilence to follow glory. Typhus is an annex of triumph. This
well was deep and was converted into a tomb. Three hundred dead were
thrown into it, perhaps with too much haste. Were they all dead? The
legend says no. And it seems that, on the night following the burial,
weak voices were heard calling from the well.
This well is isolated in the centre of the yard; three walls, half of
brick, half of stone, folded like the leaves of a screen, and forming a
square tower, surround it on three sides, while the fourth is open. The
back wall has a sort of shapeless peep-hole, probably made by a shell.
This tower once had a roof of which only the beams remain, and the iron
braces of the right-hand wall form a cross. You bend over and look down
into a deep brick cylinder full of gloom. All round the well the lower
part of the wall is hidden by nettles. This well has not in front of it
the large blue slab usually seen at all Belgian wells. Instead of it,
there is a frame-work, supporting five or six shapeless logs of knotted
wood which resemble large bones. There is no bucket, chain, or windlass
remaining: but there is still the stone trough, which served to carry
off the water. The rain-water collects in it, and from time to time a
bird comes from the neighboring forest to drink from it and then fly
away.
One house in this ruin, the farm-house, is still inhabited, and the
door of this house opens on the yard. By the side of a pretty Gothic
lock on this gate there is an iron handle. At the moment when the
Hanoverian lieutenant Wilda seized this handle in order to take shelter
in the farm, a French sapper cut off his hand with a blow of his axe.
The old gardener Van Kylsom, who has long been dead, was grandfather
of the family which now occupies the house. A gray-headed woman said
to me: "I was here, I was three years old, and my sister, who was
older, felt frightened and cried. I was carried away to the woods in
my mother's arms, and people put their ears to the ground to listen. I
imitated the cannon and said, 'Boom, boom.'" A door on the left hand
of the yard, as we said, leads into the orchard, which is terrible. It
is in three parts, we might almost say, in three acts. The first part
is a garden, the second the orchard, the third a wood. These three
parts have one common _enceinte_; near the entrance, the buildings of
the château and the farm, on the left a hedge, on the right a wall,
and at the end a wall. The right-hand wall is of brick, the bottom
one of stone. You enter the garden first; it slopes, is planted with
gooseberry-bushes, is covered with wild vegetation, and is closed by a
monumental terrace of cut stones with balustrades. It was a Seigneurial
garden in the French style, that preceded Le Notre: now it is ruins
and briers. The pilasters are surmounted by globes that resemble stone
cannon-balls. Forty-three balustrades are still erect; the others are
lying in the grass, and nearly all have marks of musket-balls. One
fractured balustrade is laid upon the stem like a broken leg.
It was in this garden, which is lower than the orchard, that six
voltigeurs of the 1st light regiment, having got in and unable to
get out, and caught like bears in a trap, accepted combat with
two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with rifles. The
Hanoverians lined the balustrade and fired down: the voltigeurs, firing
up, six intrepid men against two hundred, and having no shelter but the
gooseberry-bushes, took a quarter of an hour in dying. You climb up a
few steps and reach the orchard, properly so called. Here, on these few
square yards, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall
seems ready to recommence the fight, for the thirty-eight loop-holes
pierced by the English at irregular heights may still be seen. In front
of the wall are two English tombs made of granite. There are only
loop-holes in the south wall, for the principal attack was on that
side. This wall is concealed on the outside by a quickset hedge. The
French came up under the impression that they had only to carry this
hedge, and found the wall an obstacle and an ambuscade; the English
Guards, behind the thirty-eight loop-holes, firing at once a storm of
canister and bullets; and Soye's brigade was dashed to pieces against
it. Waterloo began thus.
The orchard, however, was taken; as the French had no ladders, they
climbed up with their nails. A hand-to-hand fight took place under the
trees, and all the grass was soaked with blood, and a battalion of
Nassau, 700 strong, was cut to pieces here. On the outside the wall,
against which Kellermann's two batteries were pointed, is pock-marked
with cannon-balls. This orchard is sensitive, like any other, to the
month of May; it has its buttercups and its daisies, the grass is tall
in it, the plough-horses browse in it, hair ropes on which linen is
hung to dry occupy the space between the trees, and make the visitor
bow his head, and as you walk along your foot sinks in mole-holes.
In the middle of the grass you notice an uprooted, outstretched, but
still flourishing tree. Major Blackman leaned against it to die. Under
another large tree close by fell the German General Duplat, a French
refugee belonging to a family that fled upon the revocation of the
edict of Nantes. Close at hand an old sickly apple-tree, poulticed with
a bandage of straw and clay, hangs its head. Nearly all the apple-trees
are dying of old age, and there is not one without its cannon-ball or
bullet. Skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard, ravens fly
about in the branches, and at the end is a wood full of violets.
Bauduin killed; Foy wounded; arson, massacre, carnage, a stream
composed of English, French, and German blood furiously mingled;
a well filled with corpses; the Nassau regiment and the Brunswick
regiment destroyed; Duplat killed; Blackman killed; the English Guards
mutilated; twenty French battalions of the forty composing Reille's
corps decimated; three thousand men in this château of Hougomont
alone, sabred, gashed, butchered, shot, and burnt,--all this that a
peasant may say to a traveller at the present day, "If you like to
give me three francs, sir, I will tell you all about the battle of
Waterloo."
CHAPTER III.
JUNE 18, 1815.
Let us go back, for that is one of the privileges of the narrator, and
place ourselves once again in the year 1815, a little prior to the
period when the matters related in the first part of this book begin.
If it had not rained on the night between the 17th and 18th June,
1815, the future of Europe would have been changed; a few drops of
rain more or less made Napoleon oscillate. In order to make Waterloo
the end of Austerlitz, Providence only required a little rain, and
a cloud crossing the sky at a season when rain was not expected was
sufficient to overthrow an empire. The battle of Waterloo could not
begin till half-past eleven, and that gave Blücher time to come up.
Why? Because the ground was moist and it was necessary for it to become
firmer, that the artillery might manœuvre. Napoleon was an artillery
officer, and always showed himself one; all his battle plans are made
for projectiles. Making artillery converge on a given point was his
key to victory. He treated the strategy of the opposing general as a
citadel, and breached it; he crushed the weak point under grape-shot,
and he began and ended his battles with artillery. Driving in squares,
pulverizing regiments, breaking lines, destroying and dispersing
masses,--all this must be done by striking, striking, striking
incessantly, and he confided the task to artillery. It was a formidable
method, and, allied to genius, rendered this gloomy pugilist of war
invincible for fifteen years.
On June 18, 1815, he counted the more on his artillery, because he
held the numerical superiority. Wellington had only one hundred and
fifty-nine guns, while Napoleon had two hundred and forty. Had the
earth been dry and the artillery able to move, the action would have
begun at six A.M. It would have been won and over by two P.M., three
hours before the Prussians changed the fortune of the day. How much
blame was there on Napoleon's side for the loss of this battle? Is the
shipwreck imputable to the pilot? Was the evident physical decline of
Napoleon at that period complicated by a certain internal diminution?
Had twenty years of war worn out the blade as well as the scabbard, the
soul as well as the body? Was the veteran being awkwardly displayed
in the captain? In a word, was the genius, as many historians of
reputation have believed, eclipsed? Was he becoming frenzied, in
order to conceal his own weakening from himself? Was he beginning
to oscillate and veer with the wind? Was he becoming unconscious of
danger, which is a serious thing in a general? In that class of great
material men who may be called the giants of action, is there an age
when genius becomes short-sighted? Old age has no power over ideal
genius; with the Dantes and the Michael Angelos old age is growth, but
is it declension for the Hannibals and the Buonapartes? Had Napoleon
lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached a point where he no
longer saw the reef, guessed the snare, and could not discern the
crumbling edge of the abyss? Could he not scent catastrophes? Had the
man who formerly knew all the roads to victory, and pointed to them
with a sovereign finger, from his flashing car, now a mania for leading
his tumultuous team of legions to the precipices? Was he attacked at
the age of forty-six by a supreme madness? Was the Titanic charioteer
of destiny now only a Phaëton?
We do not believe it.
His plan of action, it is allowed by all, was a masterpiece. Go
straight at the centre of the allied line, make a hole through the
enemy, cut him in two, drive the British half over Halle, and the
Prussians over Tingres, carry Mont St. Jean, seize Brussels, drive the
German into the Rhine and the Englishman into the sea. All this was
contained for Napoleon in this battle; afterwards he would see.
We need hardly say that we do not pretend to tell the story of Waterloo
here; one of the generating scenes of the drama we are recounting is
connected with this battle; but the story of Waterloo has been already
told, and magisterially discussed, from one point of view by Napoleon,
from another by a galaxy of historians. For our part, we leave the
historians to contend; we are only a distant witness, a passer-by
along the plain, a seeker bending over the earth made of human flesh,
and perhaps taking appearances for realities; we possess neither the
military practice nor the strategic competency that authorizes a
system; in our opinion, a chain of accidents governed both captains
at Waterloo; and when destiny, that mysterious accused, enters on the
scene, we judge like the people, that artless judge.
CHAPTER IV.
A.
Those who wish to form a distinct idea of the battle of Waterloo, need
only imagine a capital A laid on the ground. The left leg of the A is
the Nivelles road, the right one the Genappe road, while the string of
the A is the broken way running from Ohain to Braine l'Alleud. The top
of the A is Mont St. Jean, where Wellington is; the left lower point is
Hougomont, where Reille is with Jérôme Bonaparte; the right lower point
is La Belle Alliance, where Napoleon is. A little below the point where
the string of the A meets and cuts the right leg, is La Haye Sainte;
and in the centre of this string is the exact spot where the battle was
concluded. It is here that the lion is placed, the involuntary symbol
of the heroism of the old Guard.
The triangle comprised at the top of the A between the two legs and the
string, is the plateau of Mont St. Jean; the dispute for this plateau
was the whole battle. The wings of the two armies extend to the right
and left of the Genappe and Nivelles roads, d'Erlon facing Picton,
Reille facing Hill. Behind the point of the A, behind the plateau of
St. Jean, is the forest of Soignies. As for the plan itself, imagine a
vast undulating ground; each ascent commands the next ascent, and all
the undulations ascend to Mont St. Jean, ending there in the forest.
Two hostile armies on a battle-field are two wrestlers. It is a
body-grip. One tries to throw the other; they cling to everything; a
thicket is a basis; an angle in the wall is a breastwork; for want of
a village to support it, a regiment gives way; a fall in the plain, a
transverse hedge in a good position, a wood, a ravine, may arrest the
heel of that column which is called an army, and prevent it slipping.
The one who leaves the field is beaten; and hence the necessity for
the responsible chief to examine the smallest clump of trees, and
investigate the slightest rise in the ground. The two generals had
attentively studied the plain of Mont St. Jean, which is called at the
present day the field of Waterloo. In the previous year, Wellington,
with prescient sagacity, had examined it as suitable for a great
battle. On this ground and for this duel of June 18, Wellington had the
good side and Napoleon the bad; for the English army was above, the
French army below.
It is almost superfluous to sketch here the appearance of Napoleon,
mounted and with his telescope in his hand, as he appeared on the
heights of Rossomme at the dawn of June 18. Before we show him, all
the world has seen him. The calm profile under the little hat of the
Brienne school, the green uniform, the white facings concealing the
decorations, the great coat concealing the epaulettes, the red ribbon
under the waistcoat, the leather breeches, the white horse with its
housings of purple velvet, having in the corners crowned N's and
eagles, the riding-boots drawn over silk stockings, the silver spurs,
the sword of Marengo,--the whole appearance of the last of the Cæsars
rises before every mind, applauded by some, and regarded sternly by
others. This figure has for a long time stood out all light; this was
owing to a certain legendary obscuration which most heroes evolve, and
which always conceals the truth for a longer or shorter period, but
at the present day we have history and light. That brilliancy called
history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine thing about it,
that, all light as it is, and because it is light, it often throws
shadows over spots before luminous, it makes of the same man two
different phantoms, and one attacks the other, and the darkness of the
despot struggles with the lustre of the captain. Hence comes a truer
proportion in the definitive appreciation of nations; Babylon violated,
diminishes Alexander; Rome enchained, diminishes Cæsar; Jerusalem
killed, diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant, and it is a
misfortune for a man to leave behind him a night which has his form.
CHAPTER V.
THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES.
All the world knows the first phase of this battle; a troubled,
uncertain, hesitating opening, dangerous for both armies, but more so
for the English than the French. It had rained all night; the ground
was saturated; the rain had collected in hollows of the plain as in
tubs; at certain points the ammunition wagons had sunk in up to the
axle-trees and the girths of the horses; if the wheat and barley laid
low by this mass of moving vehicles had not filled the ruts, and made
a litter under the wheels, any movement, especially in the valleys,
in the direction of Papelotte, would have been impossible. The battle
began late; for Napoleon, as we have explained, was accustomed to hold
all his artillery in hand like a pistol, aiming first at one point,
then at another of the battle, and he resolved to wait until the field
batteries could gallop freely, and for this purpose it was necessary
that the sun should appear and dry the ground. But the sun did not come
out; it was no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. When the first
cannon-shot was fired, the English General Colville drew out his watch,
and saw that it was twenty-five minutes to twelve.
The action was commenced furiously, more furiously perhaps than the
Emperor desired, by the French left wing on Hougomont. At the same
time Napoleon attacked the centre by hurling Quiot's brigade on La
Haye Sainte, and Ney pushed the French right wing against the English
left, which was leaning upon Papelotte. The attack on Hougomont was,
to a certain extent, a feint, for the plan was to attract Wellington
there, and make him strengthen his left. This plan would have succeeded
had not the four companies of Guards and Perponcher's Belgian division
firmly held the position; and Wellington, instead of massing his
troops, found it only necessary to send as a reinforcement four more
companies of Guards and a battalion of Brunswickers. The attack of the
French right on Papelotte was serious; to destroy the English left,
cut the Brussels road, bar the passage for any possible Prussians,
force Mont St. Jean, drive back Wellington on Hougomont, then on Braine
l'Alleud, and then on Halle,--nothing was more distinct. Had not a few
incidents supervened; this attack would have succeeded, for Papelotte
was taken and La Haye Sainte carried.
There is a detail to be noticed here. In the English Infantry,
especially in Kempt's brigade, there were many recruits, and these
young soldiers valiantly withstood our formidable foot, and they
behaved excellently as sharp-shooters. The soldier when thrown out _en
tirailleur_, being left to some extent to his own resources, becomes as
it were his own general; and these recruits displayed something of the
French invention and fury. These novices displayed an impulse, and it
displeased Wellington.
After the taking of La Haye Sainte, the battle vacillated. There is
an obscure interval in this day, between twelve and four; the middle
of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates in the gloom of
the _mêlée._ A twilight sets in, and we perceive vast fluctuations in
this mist, a dizzying mirage, the panoply of war at that day, unknown
in our times; flaming colpacks; flying sabretaches; cross-belts;
grenade pouches; Hussar dolmans; red boots with a thousand wrinkles;
heavy shakos enwreathed with gold twist; the nearly black Brunswick
infantry mingled with the scarlet infantry of England; the English
soldiers wearing clumsy round white cushions for epaulettes; the
Hanoverian light horse with their leathern helmets, brass bands, and
red horse-tails; the Highlanders with their bare knees and checkered
plaids, and the long white gaiters of our grenadiers,--pictures but not
strategic lines; what a Salvator Rosa, but not a Gribeauval, would have
revelled in.
A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle, _quid
obscurum, quid divinum._ Every historian traces to some extent the
lineament that pleases him in the hurly-burly. Whatever the combination
of the generals may be, the collision of armed masses has incalculable
ebbs and flows; in action the two plans of the leaders enter into each
other and destroy their shape. The line of battle floats and winds like
a thread, the streams of blood flow illogically, the fronts of armies
undulate, the regiments in advancing or retiring form capes or gulfs,
and all these reefs are continually shifting their position; where
infantry was, artillery arrives; where artillery was, cavalry dash in;
the battalions are smoke. There was something there, but when you look
for it, it has disappeared; the gloomy masses advance and retreat;
a species of breath from the tomb impels, drives back, swells, and
disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a battle? An oscillation.
The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute and not a
day. To paint a battle, those powerful painters who have chaos in
their pencils are needed. Rembrandt is worth more than Vandermeulin,
for Vandermeulin, exact at mid-day, is incorrect at three o'clock.
Geometry is deceived, and the hurricane alone is true, and it is this
that gives Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add that
there is always a certain moment in which the battle degenerates into
a combat, is particularized and broken up into countless detail facts
which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, "belong rather
to the biography of regiments than to the history of the army." The
historian, in such a case, has the evident right to sum up; he can only
catch the principal outlines of the struggle, and it is not given to
any narrator, however conscientious he may be, absolutely to fix the
form of that horrible cloud which is called a battle.
This, which is true of all great armed collisions, is peculiarly
applicable to Waterloo; still, at a certain moment in the afternoon,
the battle began to assume a settled shape.
CHAPTER VI.
FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON.
At about four o'clock P.M. the situation of the English army was
serious. The Prince of Orange commanded the centre, Hill the right,
and Picton the left. The Prince of Orange, wild and intrepid, shouted
to the Dutch Belgians: "Nassau! Brunswick! never yield an inch." Hill,
fearfully weakened, had just fallen back on Wellington, while Picton
was dead. At the very moment when the English took from the French the
flag of the 105th line regiment, the French killed General Picton with
a bullet through his head. The battle had two bases for Wellington,
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte. Hougomont still held out, though on fire,
while La Haye Sainte was lost. Of the German battalion that defended
it, forty-two men only survived; all the officers but five were killed
or taken prisoners. Three thousand combatants had been massacred in
that focus; a sergeant of the English Guards, the first boxer of
England, and reputed invulnerable by his comrades, had been killed
there by a little French drummer. Baring was dislodged, and Alten was
sabred; several flags had been lost, one belonging to Alten's division
and one to the Luxembourg battalion, which was borne by a Prince of the
Deux-ponts family. The Scotch Grays no longer existed; Ponsonby's heavy
dragoons were cut to pieces,--this brave cavalry had given way before
the lancers of Bro and the cuirassiers of Travers. Of twelve hundred
sabres only six hundred remained; of three lieutenant-colonels, two
were kissing the ground, Hamilton wounded, and Mather killed. Ponsonby
had fallen, pierced by seven lance wounds; Gordon was dead, March was
dead, and two divisions, the fifth and sixth, were destroyed. Hougomont
attacked, La Haye Sainte taken; there was only one knot left, the
centre, which still held out, Wellington reinforced it; he called in
Hill from Merbe-Braine and Chassé from Braine l'Alleud.
The centre of the English army, which was slightly concave, very dense
and compact, was strongly situated; it occupied the plateau of Mont
St. Jean, having the village behind it, and before it the slope, which
at that time was rather steep. It was supported by that strong stone
house, which at that period was a domainial property of Nivelles,
standing at the cross-road, and an edifice dating from the 16th
century, so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded without doing it any
injury. All round the plateau the English had cut through the hedges at
certain spots, formed embrasures in the hawthorns, thrust guns between
branches and loop-holed the shrubs,--their artillery was ambuscaded
under the brambles. This Punic task, incontestably authorized by the
rules of war which permit snares, had been so well effected that
Haxo, who had been sent by the Emperor at eight o'clock to reconnoitre
the enemy's batteries, returned to tell Napoleon that there was no
obstacle, with exception of the barricades blocking the Nivelles and
Genappe roads. It was the season when the wheat is still standing, and
along the edge of the plateau a battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th,
was lying in the tall corn. Thus assured and supported, the centre of
the Anglo-Dutch army was in a good position.
The peril of this position was the forest of Soignies, at that time
contiguous to the battle-field and intersected by the ponds of
Groenendæl and Boitsford. An army could not have fallen back into
it without being dissolved, regiments would have been broken up at
once, and the artillery lost in the marshes. The retreat, according
to the opinion of several professional men, contradicted, it is true,
by others, would have been a flight. Wellington added to this centre
a brigade of Chassé's removed from the right wing, one of Wicke's
from the left wing, and Clinton's division. He gave his English--
Halkett's regiments, Mitchell's brigade, and Maitland's guards--as
epaulments and counterforts, the Brunswick infantry, the Nassau
contingent, Kielmansegge's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. He
had thus twenty-six battalions under his hand; as Charras says, "the
right wing deployed behind the centre." An enormous battery was masked
by earth-bags, at the very spot where what is called "the Museum of
Waterloo" now stands, and Wellington also had in a little hollow
Somerset's Dragoon Guards, counting one thousand four hundred sabres.
They were the other moiety of the so justly celebrated English cavalry;
though Ponsonby was destroyed, Somerset remained. The battery which,
had it been completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was arranged
behind a very low wall, hastily lined with sand-bags and a wide slope
of earth. This work was not finished, as there was not time to palisade
it.
Wellington, restless but impassive, was mounted, and remained for the
whole day in the same attitude, a little in front of the old mill of
Mont St. Jean, which still exists, and under an elm-tree, which an
Englishman, an enthusiastic Vandal, afterwards bought for two hundred
francs, cut down, and carried away. Wellington was coldly heroic; there
was a shower of cannon-balls, and his aide-de-camp Gordon was killed
by his side. Lord Hill, pointing to a bursting shell, said to him, "My
Lord, what are your instructions, and what orders do you leave us, if
you are killed?" "Do as I am doing," Wellington answered. To Clinton
he said laconically, "Hold out here to the last man." The day was
evidently turning badly, and Wellington cried to his old comrades of
Vittoria, Talavera, and Salamanca, "Boys, can you think of giving way?
Remember old England."
About four o'clock the English line fell back all at once; nothing was
visible on the crest of the plateau but artillery and sharp-shooters,
the rest had disappeared. The regiments, expelled by the French shell
and cannon-balls, fell back into the hollow, which at the present day
is intersected by the lane that runs to the farm of Mont St. Jean. A
retrograde movement began, the English front withdrew. Wellington was
recoiling. "It is the beginning of the retreat," Napoleon cried.
CHAPTER VII.
NAPOLEON IN GOOD HUMOR.
The Emperor, although ill, and though a local pain made riding
uncomfortable, had never been so good-tempered as on this day. From
the morning his impenetrability had been smiling, and on June 18,
1815, this profound soul, coated with granite, was radiant. The man
who had been sombre at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest
predestined men offer these contradictions, for our joys are a shadow,
and the supreme smile belongs to God. _Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit_,
the legionaries of the Fulminatrix legion used to say. On this occasion
Pompey was not destined to weep, but it is certain that Cæsar laughed.
At one o'clock in the morning, amid the rain and storm, he had explored
with Bertrand the hills near Rossomme, and was pleased to see the long
lines of English fires illumining the horizon from Frischemont to
Braine l'Alleud. It seemed to him as if destiny had made an appointment
with him on a fixed day and was punctual. He stopped his horse, and
remained for some time motionless, looking at the lightning and
listening to the thunder. The fatalist was heard to cast into the night
the mysterious words,--"We are agreed." Napoleon was mistaken; they
were no longer agreed.
He had not slept for a moment: all the instants of the past night
had been marked with joy for him. He rode through the entire line of
main guards, stopping every now and then to speak to the videttes. At
half-past two he heard the sound of a marching column near Hougomont,
and believed for a moment in a retreat on the side of Wellington. He
said to Bertrand,--"The English rear-guard is preparing to decamp. I
shall take prisoners the six thousand English who have just landed at
Ostend." He talked cheerfully, and had regained the spirits he had
displayed during the landing of March 1st, when he showed the Grand
Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Juan Gulf, and said,--"Well,
Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already." On the night between June
17 and 18 he made fun of Wellington. "This little Englishman requires
a lesson," said Napoleon. The rain became twice as violent, and it
thundered while the Emperor was speaking. At half-past three A.M. he
lost one illusion: officers sent to reconnoitre informed him that
the enemy was making no movement. Nothing was stirring, not a single
bivouac fire was extinguished, and the English army was sleeping. The
silence was profound on earth, and there was only noise in the heavens.
At four o'clock a peasant was brought to him by the scouts: this
peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably
Vivian's, which had taken up a position on the extreme left in the
village of Ohain. At five o'clock two Belgian deserters informed him
that they had just left their regiments, and the English army meant
fighting. "All the better," cried Napoleon; "I would sooner crush them
than drive them back."
At daybreak he dismounted on the slope which forms the angle of the
Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant chair brought from
the farm of Rossomme, sat down with a truss of straw for a carpet, and
laid on the table the map of the battlefield, saying to Soult,--"It
is a pretty chess-board." Owing to the night rain, the commissariat
wagons, which stuck in the muddy roads, did not arrive by daybreak.
The troops had not slept, were wet through and fasting; but this did
not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Soult,--"We have
ninety chances out of a hundred in our favor." At eight o'clock the
Emperor's breakfast was brought, and he invited several generals to
share it with him. While breakfasting, somebody said that Wellington
had been the last evening but one at a ball in Brussels, and Soult,
the rough soldier with his archbishop's face, remarked, "The ball will
be to-day." The Emperor teased Ney for saying,--"Wellington will not
be so simple as to wait for your Majesty." This was his usual manner.
"He was fond of a joke," says Fleury de Chaboulon; "The basis of his
character was a pleasant humor," says Gourgaud; "He abounded with
jests, more peculiar than witty," says Benjamin Constant. This gayety
of the giant is worth dwelling on: it was he who called his Grenadiers
"Growlers;" he pinched their ears and pulled their moustachios. "The
Emperor was always playing tricks with us," was a remark made by one
of them. During the mysterious passage from Elba to France, on February
27, the French brig of war, the _Zephyr_, met the _Inconstant_, on
board which Napoleon was concealed, and inquiring after Napoleon, the
Emperor, who still had in his hat the white and violet cockade studded
with bees which he had adopted at Elba, himself laughingly took up the
speaking-trumpet, and answered,--"The Emperor is quite well." A man
who jests in this way is on familiar terms with events. Napoleon had
several outbursts of this laughter during the breakfast of Waterloo:
after breakfast he reflected for a quarter of an hour; then two
generals sat down on the truss of straw with a pen in their hand and a
sheet of paper on their knee, and the Emperor dictated to them the plan
of the battle.
At nine o'clock, the moment when the French army, échelonned and
moving in five columns, began to deploy, the divisions in two lines,
the artillery between, the bands in front, drums rattling and
bugles braying,--a powerful, mighty, joyous army, a sea of bayonets
and helmets on the horizon, the Emperor, much affected, twice
exclaimed,--"Magnificent! magnificent!"
Between nine and half-past ten, although it seems incredible, the
whole army took up position, and was drawn up in six lines, forming,
to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's." A few
minutes after the formation of the line, and in the midst of that
profound silence which precedes the storm of a battle, the Emperor,
seeing three 12-pounder batteries defile, which had been detached by
his orders from Erlon, Reille, and Lobau's brigades, and which were
intended to begin the action at the spot where the Nivelles and Genappe
roads crossed, tapped Haxo on the shoulder, and said, "There are
twenty-four pretty girls, General." Sure of the result, he encouraged
with a smile the company of sappers of the first corps as it passed
him, which he had selected to barricade itself in Mont St. Jean, so
soon as the village was carried. All this security was only crossed
by one word of human pity: on seeing at his left, at the spot where
there is now a large tomb, the admirable Scotch Grays massed with their
superb horses, he said, "It is a pity." Then he mounted his horse,
rode toward Rossomme, and selected as his observatory a narrow strip
of grass on the right of the road running from Genappe to Brussels,
and this was his second station. The third station, the one he took
at seven in the evening, is formidable,--it is a rather lofty mound
which still exists, and behind which the guard was massed in a hollow.
Around this mound the balls ricochetted on the pavement of the road and
reached Napoleon. As at Brienne, he had round his head the whistle of
bullets and canister. Almost at the spot where his horse's hoofs stood,
cannon-balls, old sabre-blades, and shapeless rust-eaten projectiles,
have been picked up; a few years ago a live shell was dug up, the fusee
of which had broken off. It was at this station that the Emperor said
to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile timid peasant, who was fastened to a
hussar's saddle, and tried at each volley of canister to hide himself
behind Napoleon, "You ass! it is shameful; you will be killed in the
back." The person who is writing these lines himself found, while
digging up the sand in the friable slope of this mound, the remains
of a shell rotted by the oxide of forty-six years, and pieces of iron
which broke like sticks of barley-sugar between his fingers.
Everybody is aware that the undulations of the plains on which the
encounter between Napoleon and Wellington took place, are no longer
as they were on June 18, 1815. On taking from this mournful plain
the material to make a monument, it was deprived of its real relics,
and history, disconcerted, no longer recognizes itself; in order to
glorify, they disfigured. Wellington, on seeing Waterloo two years
after, exclaimed, "My battle-field has been altered." Where the huge
pyramid of earth surmounted by a lion how stands, there was a crest
which on the side of the Nivelles road had a practicable ascent, but
which on the side of the Genappe road was almost an escarpment. The
elevation of this escarpment may still be imagined by the height of
the two great tombs which skirt the road from Genappe to Brussels: the
English tomb on the left, the German tomb on the right. There is no
French tomb,--for France the whole plain is a sepulchre. Through the
thousands of cart-loads of earth employed in erecting the mound, which
is one hundred and fifty feet high and half a mile in circumference,
the plateau of Mont St. Jean is now accessible by a gentle incline;
but on the day of the battle, and especially on the side of La Haye
Sainte, it was steep and abrupt. The incline was so sharp that the
English gunners could not see beneath them the farm situated in the
bottom of the valley, which was the centre of the fight. On June 18,
1815, the rain had rendered the steep road more difficult, and the
troops not only had to climb up but slipped in the mud. Along the
centre of the crest of the plateau ran a species of ditch, which it was
impossible for a distant observer to guess. We will state what this
ditch was. Braine l'Alleud is a Belgian village and Ohain is another;
these villages, both concealed in hollows, are connected by a road
about a league and a half in length, which traverses an undulating
plain, and frequently buries itself between hills, so as to become
at certain spots a ravine. In 1815, as to-day, this road crossed the
crest of the plateau of Mont St. Jean: but at the present day it is
level with the ground, while at that time it was a hollow way. The two
slopes have been carried away to form the monumental mound. This road
was, and still is, a trench for the greater part of the distance,--a
hollow trench, in some places twelve feet deep, whose scarped sides
were washed down here and there by the winter rains. Accidents occurred
there: the road was so narrow where it entered Braine l'Alleud, that
a wayfarer was crushed there by a wagon, as is proved by a stone
cross standing near the grave-yard, which gives the name of the dead
man as "Monsieur Bernard Debrye, trader, of Brussels," and the date,
"February, 1637." It was so deep on the plateau of Mont St. Jean,
that a peasant, one Mathieu Nicaise, was crushed there in 1783 by a
fall of earth, as is proved by another stone cross, the top of which
disappeared in the excavations, but whose overthrown pedestal is still
visible on the grass slope to the left of the road between La Haye
Sainte and the farm of Mont St. Jean. On the day of the battle, this
hollow way, whose existence nothing revealed, a trench on the top of
the escarpment, a rut hidden in the earth, was invisible, that is to
say, terrible.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EMPEROR ASKS THE GUIDE A QUESTION.
On the morning of Waterloo, then, Napoleon was cheerful, and had reason
to be so,--for the plan he had drawn up was admirable. Once the battle
had begun, its various incidents,--the resistance of Hougomont; the
tenacity of La Haye Sainte; Bauduin killed, and Foy placed _hors de
combat_; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was broken;
the fatal rashness of Guilleminot, who had no petards or powder-bags
to destroy the farm gates; the sticking of the artillery in the mud;
the fifteen guns without escort captured by Uxbridge in a hollow
way; the slight effect of the shells falling in the English lines,
which buried themselves in the moistened ground, and only produced a
volcano of mud, so that the troops were merely plastered with mud; the
inutility of Piret's demonstration on Braine l'Alleud, and the whole of
his cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost annihilated; the English right
but slightly disquieted and the left poorly attacked; Ney's strange
mistake in massing instead of échelonning the four divisions of the
first corps; a depth of twenty-seven ranks and a line of two hundred
men given up in this way to the canister; the frightful gaps made by
the cannon-balls in these masses; the attacking columns disunited; the
oblique battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot,
and Durutte in danger; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Viot, that Hercules
who came from the Polytechnic school, wounded at the moment when he
was beating in with an axe the gates of La Haye Sainte, under the
plunging fire of the English barricade on the Genappe road; Marcognet's
division caught between infantry and cavalry, shot down from the wheat
by Best and Pack, and sabred by Ponsonby; its battery of seven guns
spiked; the Prince of Saxe Weimar holding and keeping in defiance of
Count d'Erlon, Frischemont and Smohain; the flags of the 105th and 45th
regiments which he had captured; the Prussian black Hussar stopped by
the scouts of the flying column of three hundred chasseurs, who were
beating the country between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things
which this man said; Grouchy's delay; the fifteen hundred men killed
in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont; the eighteen hundred
laid low even in a shorter space of time round La Haye Sainte,--all
these stormy incidents, passing like battle-clouds before Napoleon, had
scarce disturbed his glance or cast a gloom over this imperial face.
Napoleon was accustomed to look steadily at war; he never reckoned up
the poignant details; he cared little for figures, provided that they
gave the total--victory. If the commencement went wrong, he did not
alarm himself, as he believed himself master and owner of the end; he
knew how to wait, and treated Destiny as an equal. He seemed to say to
fate, "You would not dare!"
One half light, one half shade, Napoleon felt himself protected in
good, and tolerated in evil. There was, or he fancied there was, for
him a connivance, we might say almost a complicity, on the part of
events, equivalent to the ancient invulnerability; and yet, when a man
has behind him the Beresina, Leipsic, and Fontainebleau, it seems as
if he might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes visible on
the face of heaven. At the moment when Wellington retrograded, Napoleon
quivered. He suddenly saw the plateau of Mont St. Jean deserted, and
the front of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but was
screened from sight. The Emperor half raised himself in his stirrups,
and the flash of victory passed into his eyes. If Wellington were
driven back into the forest of Soignies, and destroyed, it would be
the definitive overthrow of England by France: it would be Cressy,
Poictiers, Malplaquet, and Ramilies avenged; the man of Marengo would
erase Agincourt. The Emperor, while meditating on this tremendous
stroke, turned his telescope to all parts of the battle-field. His
Guards, standing at ease behind him, gazed at him with a sort of
religious awe. He was reflecting, he examined the slopes, noted the
inclines, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the patches of barley, and
the paths; he seemed to be counting every tuft of gorse. He looked with
some fixity at the English barricades,--two large masses of felled
trees, the one on the Genappe road defended by two guns, the only ones
of all the English artillery which commanded the battlefield, and the
one on the Nivelles road, behind which flashed the Dutch bayonets of
Chassé's brigade. He remarked near this barricade the old chapel of St.
Nicholas, which is at the corner of the cross-road leading to Braine
l'Alleud. He bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste.
The guide shook his head with a probably perfidious negative.
The Emperor drew himself up and reflected; Wellington was retiring, and
all that was needed now was to complete this retreat by an overthrow.
Napoleon hurriedly turned and sent off a messenger at full speed to
Paris to announce that the battle was gained. Napoleon was one of
those geniuses from whom thunder issues, and he had just found his
thunder-stroke; he gave Milhaud's cuirassiers orders to carry the
plateau of Mont St. Jean.
CHAPTER IX.
A SURPRISE.
They were three thousand five hundred in number, and formed a front
a quarter of a league in length; they were gigantic men mounted on
colossal horses. They formed twenty-six squadrons, and had behind them,
as a support, Lefebvre Desnouette's division, composed of one hundred
and six picked gendarmes, the chasseurs of the Guard, eleven hundred
and ninety-seven sabres, and the lancers of the Guard, eight hundred
and eighty lances. They wore a helmet without a plume, and a cuirass
of wrought steel, and were armed with pistols and a straight sabre. In
the morning the whole army had admired them when they came up, at nine
o'clock, with bugles sounding, while all the bands played, "Veillons au
salut de l'Empire," in close column with one battery on their flank,
the others in their centre, and deployed in two ranks, and took their
place in that powerful second line, so skilfully formed by Napoleon,
which having at its extreme left Kellermann's cuirassiers, and on its
extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers, seemed to be endowed with two
wings of steel.
The aide-de-camp Bernard carried to them the Emperor's order: Ney drew
his sabre and placed himself at their head, and the mighty squadrons
started. Then a formidable spectacle was seen: the whole of this
cavalry, with raised sabres, with standards flying, and formed in
columns of division, descended, with one movement and as one man, with
the precision of a bronze battering-ram opening a breach, the hill of
the Belle Alliance. They entered the formidable valley in which so many
men had already fallen, disappeared in the smoke, and then, emerging
from the gloom, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still in a
close compact column, mounting at a trot, under a tremendous canister
fire, the frightful muddy incline of the plateau of Mont St. Jean. They
ascended it, stern, threatening, and imperturbable; between the breaks
in the artillery and musketry fire the colossal tramp could be heard.
As they formed two divisions, they were in two columns: Wathier's
division was on the right, Delord's on the left. At a distance it
appeared as if two immense steel snakes were crawling toward the crest
of the plateau; they traversed the battle-field like a flash.
Nothing like it had been seen since the capture of the great redoubt
of the Moskova by the heavy cavalry: Murat was missing, but Ney was
there. It seemed as if this mass had become a monster, and had but one
soul; each squadron undulated, and swelled like the rings of a polype.
This could be seen through a vast smoke which was rent asunder at
intervals; it was a pell-mell of helmets, shouts, and sabres, a stormy
bounding of horses among cannon, and a disciplined and terrible array;
while above it all flashed the cuirasses like the scales of the hydra.
Such narratives seemed to belong to another age; something like this
vision was doubtless traceable in the old Orphean epics describing
the men-horses, the ancient hippanthropists, those Titans with human
faces and equestrian chest whose gallop escaladed Olympus,--horrible,
invulnerable, sublime; gods and brutes. It was a curious numerical
coincidence that twenty-six battalions were preparing to receive the
charge of these twenty-six squadrons. Behind the crest of the plateau,
in the shadow of the masked battery, thirteen English squares, each of
two battalions and formed two deep, with seven men in the first lines
and six in the second, were waiting, calm, dumb, and motionless, with
their muskets, for what was coming. They did not see the cuirassiers,
and the cuirassiers did not see them: they merely heard this tide
of men ascending. They heard the swelling sound of three thousand
horses, the alternating and symmetrical sound of the hoof, the clang
of the cuirasses, the clash of the sabres, and a species of great
and formidable breathing. There was a long and terrible silence, and
then a long file of raised arms, brandishing sabres, and helmets, and
bugles, and standards, and three thousand heads with great moustaches,
shouting, "Long live the Emperor!" appeared above the crest. The
whole of this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the
commencement of an earthquake.
All at once, terrible to relate, the head of the column of cuirassiers
facing the English left reared with a fearful clamor. On reaching
the culminating point of the crest, furious and eager to make their
exterminating dash on the English squares and guns, the cuirassiers
noticed between them and the English a trench, a grave. It was the
sunken road of Ohain. It was a frightful moment,--the ravine was there,
unexpected, yawning, almost precipitous, beneath the horses' feet,
and with a depth of twelve feet between its two sides. The second
rank thrust the first into the abyss; the horses reared, fell back,
slipped with all four feet in the air, crushing and throwing their
riders. There was no means of escaping; the entire column was one
huge projectile. The force acquired to crush the English, crushed the
French, and the inexorable ravine would not yield till it was filled
up. Men and horses rolled into it pell-mell, crushing each other, and
making one large charnel-house of the gulf, and when this grave was
full of living men the rest passed over them. Nearly one-third of
Dubois' brigade rolled into this abyss. This commenced the loss of
the battle. A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates, says that
two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the sunken
road of Ohain. These figures probably comprise the other corpses cast
into the ravine on the day after the battle. It was this brigade of
Dubois, so fatally tried, which an hour before, charging unsupported,
had captured the flag of the Luxembourg battalion. Napoleon, before
ordering this charge, had surveyed the ground, but had been unable to
see this hollow way, which did not form even a ripple on the crest of
the plateau. Warned, however, by the little white chapel which marks
its juncture with the Nivelles road, he had asked Lacoste a question,
probably as to whether there was any obstacle. The guide answered No,
and we might almost say that Napoleon's catastrophe was brought about
by a peasant's shake of the head.
Other fatalities were yet to arise. Was it possible for Napoleon to win
the battle? We answer in the negative. Why? On account of Wellington,
on account of Blücher? No; on account of God. Buonaparte, victor at
Waterloo, did not harmonize with the law of the 19th century. Another
series of facts was preparing, in which Napoleon had no longer a place:
the ill will of events had been displayed long previously. It was
time for this vast man to fall; his excessive weight in human destiny
disturbed the balance. This individual alone was of more account than
the universal group: such plethoras of human vitality concentrated
in a single head--the world, mounting to one man's brain--would be
mortal to civilization if they endured. The moment had arrived for the
incorruptible supreme equity to reflect, and it is probable that the
principles and elements on which the regular gravitations of the moral
order as of the material order depend, complained. Streaming blood,
over-crowded grave-yards, mothers in tears, are formidable pleaders.
When the earth is suffering from an excessive burden, there are
mysterious groans from the shadow, which the abyss hears. Napoleon had
been denounced in infinitude, and his fall was decided. He had angered
God. Waterloo is not a battle, but a transformation of the Universe.
CHAPTER X.
THE PLATEAU OF MONT ST. JEAN.
The battery was unmasked simultaneously with the ravine,--sixty guns
and the thirteen squares thundered at the cuirassiers at point-blank
range. The intrepid General Delort gave a military salute to the
English battery. The whole of the English field artillery had entered
the squares at a gallop; the cuirassiers had not even a moment for
reflection. The disaster of the hollow way had decimated but not
discouraged them; they were of that nature of men whose hearts
grow large when their number is diminished. Wathier's column alone
suffered in the disaster: but Delort's column, which he had ordered
to wheel to the left, as if he suspected the trap, arrived entire.
The cuirassiers rushed at the English squares at full gallop, with
hanging bridles, sabres in their mouths, and pistols in their hands.
There are moments in a battle when the soul hardens a man, so that
it changes the soldier into a statue, and all flesh becomes granite.
The English battalions, though fiercely assailed, did not move. Then
there was a frightful scene. All the faces of the English squares were
attacked simultaneously, and a frenzied whirl surrounded them. But
the cold infantry remained impassive; the front rank kneeling received
the cuirassiers on their bayonets, while the second fired at them;
behind the second rank the artillery-men loaded their guns, the front
of the square opened to let an eruption of canister pass, and then
closed again. The cuirassiers responded by attempts to crush their foe;
their great horses reared, leaped over the bayonets, and landed in the
centre of the four living walls. The cannon-balls made gaps in the
cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of
men disappeared, trampled down by the horses, and bayonets were buried
in the entrails of these centaurs. Hence arose horrible wounds, such
as were probably never seen elsewhere. The squares, where broken by
the impetuous cavalry, contracted without yielding an inch of ground;
inexhaustible in canister they produced an explosion in the midst of
the assailants. The aspect of this combat was monstrous: these squares
were no longer battalions, but craters; these cuirassiers were no
longer cavalry, but a tempest,--each square was a volcano attacked by a
storm; the lava combated the lightning.
The extreme right square, the most exposed of all, as it was in the
air, was nearly annihilated in the first attack. It was formed of the
75th Highlanders; the piper in the centre, while his comrades were
being exterminated around him, was seated on a drum, with his bagpipe
under his arm, and playing mountain airs. These Scotchmen died thinking
of Ben Lothian, as the Greeks did remembering Argos. A cuirassier's
sabre, by cutting through the pibroch and the arm that held it, stopped
the tune by killing the player.
The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and reduced by the
catastrophe of the ravine, had against them nearly the whole English
army; but they multiplied themselves, and each man was worth ten. Some
Hanoverian battalions, however, gave way: Wellington saw it and thought
of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at this moment thought of his infantry,
the battle would have been won, and this forgetfulness was his great
and fatal fault. All at once the assailers found themselves assailed;
the English cavalry were on their backs, before them the squares,
behind them Somerset with the one thousand four hundred Dragoon Guards.
Somerset had on his right Dornberg with the German chevau-legers, and
on his left Trip with the Belgian carbineers; the cuirassiers, attacked
on the flank and in front, before and behind, by infantry and cavalry,
were compelled to make a front on all sides. But what did they care?
They were a whirlwind; their bravery became indescribable.
In addition, they had behind them the still thundering battery, and it
was only in such a way that these men could be wounded in the back.
One of these cuirasses with a hole through the left scapula is in
the Waterloo Museum. For such Frenchmen, nothing less was required
than such Englishmen. It was no longer a _mêlée_; it was a headlong
fury, a hurricane of flashing swords. In an instant the one thousand
four hundred Dragoons were only eight hundred; and Fuller, their
lieutenant-colonel, was dead. Ney dashed up with Lefebvre Desnouette's
lancers and chasseurs; the plateau of Mont St. Jean was taken and
retaken, and taken again. The cuirassiers left the cavalry to attack
the infantry, or, to speak more correctly, all these men collared one
another and did not loose their hold. The squares still held out after
twelve assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him, and one half
of the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This struggle lasted two
hours. The English army was profoundly shaken; and there is no doubt
that, had not the cuirassiers been weakened in their attack by the
disaster of the sunken road, they would have broken through the centre
and decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton,
who had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three parts vanquished,
admired heroically; he said in a low voice, "Splendid!" The cuirassiers
annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, captured or spiked sixty
guns, and took six English regimental flags, which three cuirassiers
and three chasseurs of the Guard carried to the Emperor before the farm
of La Belle Alliance.
Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle resembled a
fight between two savage wounded men, who constantly lose their blood
while continuing the struggle. Which would be the first to fall? The
combat for the plateau continued. How far did the cuirassiers get? No
one could say; but it is certain that on the day after the battle, a
cuirassier and his horse were found dead on the weighing machine of
Mont St. Jean, at the very spot where the Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe,
and Brussels roads intersect and meet. This horseman had pierced the
English lines. One of the men who picked up this corpse still lives at
Mont St. Jean; his name is Dehaye, and he was eighteen years of age
at the time. Wellington felt himself giving way, and the crisis was
close at hand. The cuirassiers had not succeeded, in the sense that
the English centre had not been broken. Everybody held the plateau,
and nobody held it; but, in the end, the greater portion remained in
the hands of the English. Wellington had the village and the plain;
Ney, only the crest and the slope. Both sides seemed to have taken
root in this mournful soil. But the weakness of the English seemed
irremediable, for the hemorrhage of this army was horrible. Kempt on
the left wing asked for reinforcements. "There are none," Wellington
replied. Almost at the same moment, by a strange coincidence which
depicts the exhaustion of both armies, Ney asked Napoleon for infantry,
and Napoleon answered, "Infantry? where does he expect me to get them?
Does he think I can make them?"
Still the English army was the worse of the two; the furious attacks of
these great squadrons with their iron cuirasses and steel chests had
crushed their infantry. A few men round the colors marked the place of
a regiment, and some battalions were only commanded by a captain or a
lieutenant. Alten's division, already so maltreated at La Haye Sainte,
was nearly destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade
lay among the wheat along the Nivelles road: hardly any were left of
those Dutch Grenadiers who, in 1811, fought Wellington in Spain,
on the French side, and who, in 1815, joined the English and fought
Napoleon. The loss in officers was considerable; Lord Uxbridge, who had
his leg interred the next day, had a fractured knee. If on the side of
the French, in this contest of the cuirassiers, Delord, l'Heretier,
Colbert, Duof, Travers, and Blancard were _hors de combat_, on the side
of the English, Alten was wounded, Barnes was wounded, Delancey killed,
Van Meeren killed, Ompteda killed, Wellington's staff decimated,--and
England had the heaviest scale in this balance of blood. The 2d
regiment of foot-guards had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four
captains, and three ensigns; the first battalion of the 30th had
lost twenty-four officers, and one hundred and twelve men; the 79th
Highlanders had twenty-four officers wounded, and eighteen officers and
four hundred and fifty men killed. Cumberland's Hanoverian Hussars,
an entire regiment, having their Colonel Hacke at their head, who
at a later date was tried and cashiered, turned bridle during the
flight and fled into the forest of Soignies, spreading the rout as
far as Brussels. The wagons, ammunition trains, baggage trains, and
ambulance carts full of wounded, on seeing the French, gave ground,
and approaching the forest, rushed into it; the Dutch, sabred by the
French cavalry, broke in confusion. From Vert Coucou to Groenendæl, a
distance of two leagues on the Brussels roads, there was, according
to the testimony of living witnesses, a dense crowd of fugitives,
and the panic was so great that it assailed the Prince de Condé at
Mechlin and Louis XVIII. at Ghent. With the exception of the weak
reserve échelonned behind the field hospital established at the farm
of Mont St. Jean, and Vivian's and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked
the left wing, Wellington had no cavalry left, and many of the guns
lay dismounted. These facts are confessed by Siborne; and Pringle,
exaggerating the danger, goes so far as to state that the Anglo-Dutch
army was reduced to thirty-four thousand men. The Iron Duke remained
firm, but his lips blanched. The Austrian commissioner Vincent, and the
Spanish commissioner Alava, who were present at the battle, thought the
Duke lost; at five o'clock Wellington looked at his watch, and could be
heard muttering, "Blücher or night!"
It was this moment that a distant line of bayonets glistened on the
heights on the side of Frischemont. This was the climax of the gigantic
drama.
CHAPTER XI
BÜLOW TO THE RESCUE.
Everybody knows Napoleon's awful mistake; Grouchy expected, Blücher
coming up, death instead of life. Destiny has such turnings as this:
men anticipate the throne of the world, and perceive St. Helena. If the
little shepherd who served as guide to Bülow, Blücher's lieutenant,
had advised him to debouche from the forest above Frischemont, instead
of below Plancenoit, the form of the 19th century would have been
different, for Napoleon would have won the battle of Waterloo. By any
other road than that below Plancenoit the Prussian army would have
come upon a ravine impassable by artillery, and Bülow would not have
arrived. Now one hour's delay--the Prussian general Muffling declares
it--and Blücher would not have found Wellington erect,--"the battle
was lost." It was high time, as we see, for Bülow to arrive, and as
it was he had been greatly delayed. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont
and started at daybreak but the roads were impracticable, and his
divisions stuck in the mud. The ruts came up to the axle-tree of the
guns; moreover, he was compelled to cross the Dyle by the narrow bridge
of Wavre: the street leading to the bridge had been burned by the
French, and artillery train and limbers, which could not pass between
two rows of blazing houses, were compelled to wait till the fire was
extinguished. By mid-day Bülow's vanguard had scarce reached Chapelle
Saint Lambert.
Had the action begun two hours sooner, it would have been over at
four o'clock, and Blücher would have fallen upon the battle gained by
Napoleon. At mid-day, the Emperor had been the first to notice through
his telescope, on the extreme horizon, something which fixed his
attention, and he said, "I see over there a cloud which appears to me
to be troops." Then he asked the Duke of Dalmatia, "Soult, what do you
see in the direction of Chapelle Saint Lambert?" The Marshal, after
looking through his telescope, replied, "Four or five thousand men,
Sire." It was evidently Grouchy; still they remained motionless in the
mist. All the staff examined the cloud pointed out by the Emperor, and
some said, "They are columns halting;" but the majority were of opinion
that they were trees. The truth is that the cloud did not move, and the
Emperor detached Doncoul's division of light cavalry to reconnoitre in
the direction of this dark point.
Bülow, in fact, had not stirred, for his vanguard was very weak and
could effect nothing. He was obliged to wait for the main body of the
army, and had orders to concentrate his troops before forming line; but
at five o'clock, Blücher, seeing Wellington's danger, ordered Bülow to
attack, and employed the remarkable phrase, "We must let the English
army breathe." A short time after, Losthin's, Hiller's, Hacke's, and
Ryssel's brigades deployed in front of Lobau's corps, the cavalry of
Prince William of Prussia debouched from the Bois de Paris, Plancenoit
was in flames, and the Prussian cannon-balls began pouring even upon
the ranks of the guard held in reserve behind Napoleon.
CHAPTER XII.
THE GUARD.
The rest is known,--the irruption of a third army; the battle
dislocated; eighty-six cannon thundering simultaneously; Pirch I.
coming up with Bülow; Ziethen's cavalry led by Blücher in person:
the French driven back; Marcognet swept from the plateau of Ohain;
Durutte dislodged from Papelotte; Donzelot and Quiot falling back;
Lobau attacked on the flank; a new battle rushing at nightfall on
the weakened French regiments; the whole English line resuming the
offensive, and pushed forward; the gigantic gap made in the French army
by the combined English and Prussian batteries; the extermination, the
disaster in front, the disaster on the flank, and the guard forming
line amid this fearful convulsion. As they felt they were going to
death, they shouted, "Long live the Emperor!" History has nothing more
striking than this death-rattle breaking out into acclamations. The sky
had been covered the whole day, but at this very moment--eight o'clock
in the evening--the clouds parted in the horizon, and the sinister red
glow of the setting sun was visible through the elms on the Nivelles
road. It had been seen to rise at Austerlitz.
Each battalion of the Guard, for this _dénouement_, was commanded by
a general; Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlot, Mallet, and Pont de Morvan
were there. When the tall bearskins of the Grenadiers of the Guard
with the large eagle device appeared, symmetrical in line, and calm,
in the twilight of this fight, the enemy felt a respect for France;
they fancied they saw twenty victories entering the battlefield with
outstretched wings, and the men who were victors, esteeming themselves
vanquished, fell back; but Wellington shouted, "Up, Guards, and take
steady aim!" The red regiment of English Guards, which had been lying
down behind the hedges, rose; a storm of canister rent the tricolor
flag waving above the heads of the French; all rushed forward, and the
supreme carnage commenced. The Imperial Guard felt in the darkness
the army giving way around them, and the vast staggering of the rout:
they heard the cry of "Sauve qui peut!" substituted for the "Vive
l'Empereur!" and with flight behind them they continued to advance,
hundreds falling at every step they took. None hesitated or evinced
timidity; the privates were as heroic as the generals, and not one
attempted to escape suicide.
Ney, wild, and grand in the consciousness of accepted death, offered
himself to every blow in this combat. He had his fifth horse killed
under him here. Bathed in perspiration, with a flame in his eye and
foam on his lips, his uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulettes
half-cut through by the sabre-cut of a horse-guard, and his decoration
of the great Eagle dinted by a bullet,--bleeding, muddy, magnificent,
and holding a broken sword in his hand, he shouted, "Come and see how a
marshal of France dies on the battle-field!" But it was in vain; he did
not die. He was haggard and indignant, and hurled at Drouet d'Erlon the
question, "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" He yelled amid
the roar of all this artillery, crushing a handful of men, "Oh, there
is nothing for me! I should like all these English cannon-balls to
enter my chest!" You were reserved for French bullets, unfortunate man.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE CATASTROPHE.
The rout in the rear of the guard was mournful; the army suddenly
gave way on all sides simultaneously,--at Hougomont, La Haye Sainte,
Papelotte, and Plancenoit. The cry of "Treachery!" was followed by that
of "Sauve qui peut!" An army which disbands is like a thaw,--all gives
way, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, comes into collision, and dashes
forward. Ney borrows a horse, leaps on it, and without hat, stock, or
sword, dashes across the Brussels road, stopping at once English and
French. He tries to hold back the army, he recalls it, he insults it,
he clings wildly to the rout to hold it back. The soldiers fly from
him, shouting, "Long live Marshal Ney!" Two regiments of Durutte's
move backward and forward in terror, and as it were tossed between the
sabres of the Hussars and the musketry fire of Kempt's, Best's, and
Pack's brigades. A rout is the highest of all confusions, for friends
kill one another in order to escape, and squadrons and battalions dash
against and destroy one another. Lobau at one extremity and Reille
at the other are carried away by the torrent. In vain does Napoleon
build a wall of what is left of the Guard; in vain does he expend his
own special squadrons in a final effort. Quiot retires before Vivian,
Kellermann before Vandeleur, Lobau before Bülow, Moraud before Pirch,
and Domor and Subervie before Prince William of Prussia. Guyot, who
led the Emperor's squadrons to the charge, falls beneath the horses
of English Dragoons. Napoleon gallops along the line of fugitives,
harangues, urges, threatens, and implores them; all the mouths that
shouted "Long live the Emperor!" in the morning, remained wide open;
they hardly knew him. The Prussian cavalry, who had come up fresh, dash
forward, cut down, kill, and exterminate. The artillery horses dash
forward with the guns; the train soldiers unharness the horses from
the caissons and escape on them; wagons overthrown, and with their
four wheels in the air, block up the road and supply opportunities for
massacre. Men crush one another and trample over the dead and over the
living. A multitude wild with terror fill the roads, the paths, the
bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys, and the woods, which are
thronged by this flight of forty thousand men. Cries, desperation;
knapsacks and muskets cast into the wheat; passages cut with the edge
of the sabres; no comrades, no officers, no generals recognized,--an
indescribable terror. Ziethen sabring France at his ease. The lions
become kids. Such was this fight.
At Genappe an effort was made to turn and rally; Lobau collected three
hundred men; the entrance of the village was barricaded, but at the
first round of Prussian canister all began flying again, and Lobau was
made prisoner. This volley of shot may still be seen, buried in the
gable of an old brick house on the right of the road, just before you
reach Genappe. The Prussians dashed into Genappe, doubtless furious at
being such small victors, and the pursuit was monstrous, for Blücher
commanded extermination. Roguet had given the mournful example of
threatening with death any French Grenadier who brought in a Prussian
prisoner, and Blücher surpassed Roguet Duchesme, general of the
young guard, who was pursued into the doorway of an inn in Genappe,
surrendered his sword to an Hussar of death, who took the sword and
killed the prisoner. The victory was completed by the assassination of
the vanquished. Let us punish, as we are writing history,--old Blücher
dishonored himself. This ferocity set the seal on the disaster; the
desperate rout passed through Genappe, passed through Quatre Bras,
passed through Sombreffe, passed through Frasnes, passed through Thuin,
passed through Charleroi, and only stopped at the frontier. Alas! and
who was it flying in this way? The grand army.
Did this vertigo, this terror, this overthrow of the greatest bravery
that ever astonished history, take place without a cause? No. The
shadow of a mighty right hand is cast over Waterloo; it is the day of
destiny, and the force which is above man produced that day. Hence
the terror, hence all those great souls laying down their swords.
Those who had conquered Europe, fell crushed, having nothing more to
say or do, and feeling a terrible presence in the shadow. _Hoc erat
in fatis._ On that day the perspective of the human race was changed,
and Waterloo is the hinge of the 19th century. The disappearance of
the great man was necessary for the advent of the great age, and He
who cannot be answered undertook the task. The panic of the heroes
admits of explanation: in the battle of Waterloo there is more than a
storm,--there is a meteor.
At nightfall, Bernard and Bertrand seized by the skirt of his coat, in
a field near Genappe, a haggard, thoughtful, gloomy man, who, carried
so far by the current of the rout, had just dismounted, passed the
bridle over his arm, and was now, with wandering eye, returning alone
to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense somnambulist of the shattered
dream, still striving to advance.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE LAST SQUARE.
A few squares of the Guard, standing motionless in the swash of the
rout, like rocks in running water, held out till night. They awaited
the double shadow of night and death, and let them surround them. Each
regiment, isolated from the others, and no longer connected with the
army which was broken on all sides, died where it stood. In order to
perform this last exploit, they had taken up a position, some on the
heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont St. Jean. The gloomy
squares, deserted, conquered, and terrible, struggled formidably with
death, for Ulm, Wagram, Jena, and Friedland were dying in it. When
twilight set in at nine in the evening, one square still remained at
the foot of the plateau of Mont St. Jean. In this mournful valley,
at the foot of the slope scaled by the cuirassiers, now inundated by
the English masses, beneath the converging fire of the hostile and
victorious artillery, under a fearful hailstorm of projectiles, this
square still resisted. It was commanded by an obscure officer of the
name of Cambronne. At each volley the square diminished, but continued
to reply to the canister with musketry fire, and each moment contracted
its four walls. Fugitives in the distance, stopping at moments to draw
breath, listened in the darkness to this gloomy diminishing thunder.
When this legion had become only a handful, when their colors were but
a rag, when their ammunition was exhausted, and muskets were clubbed,
and when the pile of corpses was greater than the living group, the
victors felt a species of sacred awe, and the English artillery ceased
firing. It was a sort of respite; these combatants had around them an
army of spectres, outlines of mounted men, the black profile of guns,
and the white sky visible through the wheels; the colossal death's-head
which heroes ever glimpse in the smoke of a battle, advanced and
looked at them. They could hear in the twilight gloom that the guns
were being loaded; the lighted matches, resembling the eyes of a
tiger in the night, formed a circle round their heads. The linstocks
of the English batteries approached the guns, and at this moment an
English general,--Colville according to some, Maitland according to
others,--holding the supreme moment suspended over the heads of these
men, shouted to them, "Brave Frenchmen, surrender!"
Cambronne answered, "Merde!"
CHAPTER XV.
CAMBRONNE.
Out of respect for the French reader, the grandest word that any
Frenchman has ever uttered must not be repeated. Dump no sublimity into
the stream of history.
At our own risk, we shall disregard this notice.
Among these giants, then, there was one Titan, Cambronne.
To speak out this word and then die, what could be more sublime than
this! For to be ready to die is to die, and it was no fault of his if
amid a storm of grape-shot he still lived.
The man who won the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon routed; it was
not Wellington giving ground at four o'clock, driven to despair at
five; it was not Blücher, who had not fought at all: the man who won
the battle of Waterloo was Cambronne.
To overwhelm with such a word the thunder-bolt which kills you, is to
win the victory.
To reply thus to disaster, to say this to fate, to lay such a
foundation for the lion which was to mark the spot, to hurl this reply
to the night's rain, to the masked wall of Hougomont, to the sunken
road of Ohain, to the delay of Grouchy, to the arrival of Blücher,
to be Irony in the tomb, to struggle to his feet again after having
fallen, to drown in two syllables the European coalition, to offer to
kings these latrines already used by the Cæsars, to make the last of
words the first, lending it the splendor of France, to end Waterloo
with the jeers of the Mardi-Gras, to supplement Leonidas with Rabelais,
to sum up this victory in one last word impossible to repeat, to lose
ground and preserve history, after such carnage to have the laugh on
his side, this is grand.
This insult to the lightning reaches the sublimity of Æschylus.
Cambronne's exclamation has the effect of an explosion. It is the
bursting of a bosom with disdain; it is the surcharge of agony which
breaks out. Who did conquer? Was it Wellington? No. Without Blücher
he was lost. Was it Blücher? No. If Wellington had not begun, Blücher
could not have finished. This Cambronne, this new-comer upon the scene,
this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal atom of the war, feels that
there is a lie somewhere in the disaster, which doubles its bitterness;
and at the moment when he is bursting with rage, they offer him this
mockery, life! How could he help bursting out? They are there,--all the
kings of Europe, the conquering generals, the thundering Jupiters; they
have a hundred thousand victorious soldiers, and behind the hundred
thousand, a million; their cannon, the matches lighted, are yawning;
they have trampled under foot the Imperial Guard and the Grand Army;
they have just crushed Napoleon; only Cambronne is left; only this
earthworm remains to protest. He will protest. Then he looks about
for a word, as he would for a sword. Froth rises to his lips, and this
froth is the word. Before this victory, stupendous but commonplace,
before this victory without victors, driven to despair, he stands erect
again. He yields to its weight, but he proves its nothingness; and he
does more than spit upon it; and weighed down by numbers, by force, by
matter, he finds for his soul one expression, "Merde!" We repeat--to
say this, to do this, to find this, is to win the victory.
The spirit of the great past entered into this unknown man at this
fatal moment. Cambronne finds the word of Waterloo just as Rouget de
l'Isle finds the Marseillaise--by an inspiration from above. A magnetic
current from the divine whirlwind passes through these men and they
vibrate, and one sings the grand song, the other utters the terrible
cry. This word of superhuman scorn Cambronne hurls not alone at Europe
in the name of the Empire,--that would be little; he hurls it at the
past in the name of the Revolution. In Cambronne is heard and is
recognized the old soul of the giants. It seems as if it were Danton
speaking or Kleber roaring.
To this word of Cambronne's, the English voice replied, "Fire!" The
batteries blazed, the hill trembled, from all these brazen mouths
leaped a last fearful belching of grape, a dense cloud of smoke
rolled forth silvered in waves by the rising moon, and when the smoke
cleared away, there was nothing left there. This dreaded remnant was
annihilated. The four walls of the living redoubt lay low, there being
hardly perceptible here and there a quivering among the corpses; and
thus the French legions, greater than those of Rome, died at Mont
St. Jean, on the earth drenched with rain and blood, in the gloomy
wheat-fields, at the spot where now there passes at four o'clock in the
morning, whistling and gayly flicking his horse with the whip, Joseph,
who drives the Nivelles mail-cart.
CHAPTER XVI.
QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE.
The Battle of Waterloo is an enigma as obscure for those who gained it
as for him who lost it. To Napoleon it is a panic; Blücher sees nothing
in it but fire; Wellington does not understand it at all. Look at the
reports: the bulletins are confused; the commentaries are entangled;
the latter stammer, the former stutter. Jomini divides the battle of
Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it into three acts; Charras,
although we do not entirely agree with him in all his appreciations,
has alone caught with his haughty eye the characteristic lineaments of
this catastrophe of human genius contending with divine chance. All the
other historians suffer from a certain bedazzlement in which they grope
about. It was a flashing day; in truth, the overthrow of the military
monarchy which, to the great stupor of the kings, has dragged down all
kingdoms,--the downfall of strength and the rout of war.
In this event, which bears the stamp of superhuman necessity, men play
but a small part. If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, does
that deprive England and Germany of anything? No. Neither illustrious
England nor august Germany is in question in the problem of Waterloo;
for, thank Heaven! nations are great without the mournful achievements
of the sword. Neither Germany nor England nor France is held in a
scabbard; at this day, when Waterloo is only a clash of sabres, Germany
has Goethe above Blücher, and England Byron above Wellington. A mighty
dawn of ideas is peculiar to our age; and in this dawn England and
Germany have their own magnificent flash. They are majestic because
they think; the high level they bring to civilization is intrinsic
to them; it comes from themselves and not from an accident. Any
aggrandizement the 19th century may have cannot boast of Waterloo as
its fountain-head; for only barbarous nations grow suddenly after a
victory: it is the transient vanity of torrents swollen by a storm.
Civilized nations, especially at the present day, are not elevated or
debased by the good or evil fortune of a captain, and their specific
weight in the human family results from something more than a battle.
Their honor, dignity, enlightenment, and genius are not numbers which
those gamblers, heroes, and conquerors can stake in the lottery of
battles. Very often a battle lost is progress gained, and less of glory
more of liberty. The drummer is silent and reason speaks; it is the
game of who loses wins. Let us, then, speak of Waterloo coldly from
both sides, and render to chance the things that belong to chance, and
to God what is God's. What is Waterloo,--a victory? No; a great prize
in the lottery. A prize won by Europe and paid by France. It was hardly
worth while erecting a lion for it.
Waterloo, by the way, is the strangest encounter recorded in history;
Napoleon and Wellington are not enemies, but contraries. Never did
God, who delights in antitheses, produce a more striking contrast or
a more extraordinary confrontation. On one side precision, foresight,
geometry, prudence, a retreat assured, reserves prepared, an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy profiting by the ground,
tactics balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, war
regulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, old
classic courage and absolute correctness. On the other side we have
intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a
flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes like
lightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, association with
destiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned,
and to some extent compelled, to obey, the despot going so far as
even to tyrannize over the battle-field; faith in a star blended with
strategic science, heightening but troubling it. Wellington was the
Barême of war, Napoleon was its Michael Angelo, and this true genius
was conquered by calculation. On both sides somebody was expected; and
it was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon waited for Grouchy,
who did not come; Wellington waited for Blücher, and he came.
Wellington is the classical war taking its revenge; Bonaparte, in his
dawn, had met it in Italy and superbly defeated it,--the old owl fled
before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only overthrown,
but scandalized. Who was this Corsican of six-and-twenty years of
age? What meant this splendid ignoramus who, having everything against
him, nothing for him, without provisions, ammunition, guns, shoes,
almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, dashed
at allied Europe, and absurdly gained impossible victories? Whence
came this mad thunderer, who, almost without taking breath, pulverized
one after another the five armies of the Emperor of Germany, upsetting
Beaulieu upon Alvinzi, Wurmser upon Beaulieu, Mélas upon Wurmser, Mack
upon Mélas? Who was this new-comer of war who possessed the effrontery
of a planet? The academic military school excommunicated him, while
bolting, and hence arose an implacable rancor of the old Cæsarism
against the new, of the old sabre against the flashing sword, and of
the chess-board against genius. On June 18, 1815, this rancor got the
best; and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, and
Arcola, it wrote,--Waterloo. It was a triumph of mediocrity, sweet
to majorities, and destiny consented to this irony. In his decline,
Napoleon found a young Wurmser before him,--in fact, it is only
necessary to whiten Wellington's hair in order to have a Wurmser.
Waterloo is a battle of the first class, gained by a captain of the
second.
What must be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England, the English
firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; and what England
had really superb in it is (without offence) herself; it is not her
captain, but her army. Wellington, strangely ungrateful, declares in
his despatch to Lord Bathurst, that his army, the one which fought
on June 18, 1815, was a "detestable army." What does the gloomy pile
of bones buried in the trenches of Waterloo think of this? England
has been too modest to herself in her treatment of Wellington; for
making him so great is making herself small. Wellington is merely a
hero like any other man. The Scotch Grays, the Life Guards, Maitland
and Mitchell's regiments, Pack and Kempt's infantry, Ponsonby and
Somerset's cavalry, the Highlanders playing the bagpipes under the
shower of canister, Ryland's battalions, the fresh recruits who
could hardly manage a musket and yet held their ground against the
old bands of Essling and Rivoli,--all this is grand. Wellington was
tenacious, that was his merit, and we do not deny it to him; but the
lowest of his privates and his troopers was quite as solid as he, and
the iron soldier is as good as the iron duke. For our part, all our
glorification is offered to the English soldier, the English army,
the English nation; and if there must be a trophy, it is to England
that this trophy is owing. The Waterloo column would be more just if,
instead of the figure of a man, it raised to the clouds the statue of a
people.
But this great England will be irritated by what we are writing here;
for she still has feudal illusions, after her 1688, and the French
1789. This people believes in inheritance and hierarchy; and while no
other excels it in power and glory, it esteems itself as a nation and
not as a people. As a people, it readily subordinates itself, and takes
a lord as its head; the workman lets himself be despised; the soldier
puts up with flogging. It will be remembered that, at the battle of
Inkermann, a sergeant who, as it appears, saved the British army,
could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, because the military hierarchy
does not allow any hero below the rank of officer to be mentioned
in despatches. What we admire before all, in an encounter like
Waterloo, is the prodigious skill of chance. The night rain, the wall
of Hougomont, the sunken road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,
Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bülow's guide enlightening him,--all
this cataclysm is marvellously managed.
Altogether, we will assert, there is more of a massacre than of a
battle in Waterloo. Waterloo, of all pitched battles, is the one which
had the smallest front for such a number of combatants,--Napoleon's,
three quarters of a league, Wellington's, half a league, and
seventy-two thousand combatants on either side. From this density came
the carnage. The following calculation has been made and proportion
established: loss of men at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;
Russian, thirty per cent; Austrian, forty-four per cent: at Wagram,
French, thirteen per cent; Austrian, fourteen per cent: at Moskova,
French, thirty-seven per cent; Russian, forty-four per cent: at
Bautzen, French, thirteen per cent; Russian and Prussian, fourteen per
cent: at Waterloo, French, fifty-six per cent; Allies, thirty-one per
cent,--total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent, or out of one hundred
and forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand killed and
wounded. The field of Waterloo has at the present day that calmness
which belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains. At night, a sort
of visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveller walk about it,
and listen and dream like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi, the
hallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18
lives again, the false monumental hill is levelled, the wondrous lion
is dissipated, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry
undulate on the plain, furious galloping crosses the horizon; the
startled dreamer sees the flash of sabres, the sparkle of bayonets, the
red light of shells, the monstrous collision of thunderbolts; he hears,
like a death-groan from the tomb, the vague clamor of the phantom
battle. These shadows are grenadiers; these flashes are cuirassiers;
this skeleton is Napoleon; this skeleton is Wellington; all this is
non-existent, and yet still combats, and the ravines are stained
purple, and the trees rustle, and there is fury even in the clouds and
in the darkness, while all the stern heights--Mont St. Jean, Hougomont,
Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--seem confusedly crowned by
hosts of spectres exterminating one another.
CHAPTER XVII.
OUGHT WATERLOO TO BE APPLAUDED?
There exists a highly respectable liberal school, which does not
detest Waterloo, but we do not belong to it. For us Waterloo is
only the stupefied date of liberty; for such an eagle to issue
from such a shell is assuredly unexpected. Waterloo, if we place
ourselves at the culminating point of the question, is intentionally
a counter-revolutionary victory,--it is Europe against France; it
is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against Paris; it is the _statu
quo_ opposed to the initiative; it is the 14th July, 1789, attacked
through March 20, 1815; it is all the monarchies clearing the decks
to conquer the indomitable French spirit of revolt. The dream was to
extinguish this vast people which had been in a state of eruption
for six-and-twenty years; and for this purpose, Brunswick, Nassau,
the Romanoffs, Hohenzollern, and the Hapsburger coalesced with the
Bourbons, and Waterloo carries divine right on its pillion. It is true
that as the Empire was despotic, Royalty, by the natural reaction
of things, was compelled to be liberal, and a constitutional order
issued from Waterloo, much to the regret of the conquerors. The fact
is, that the Revolution can never be really conquered, and being
providential and absolutely fatal, it constantly reappears,--before
Waterloo in Napoleon overthrowing the old thrones; after Waterloo in
Louis XVIII. granting and enduring the charter. Bonaparte places a
postilion on the throne of Naples, and a sergeant on the throne of
Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate equality; Louis XVIII. at
St. Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights of man. If you
wish to understand what revolution is, call it progress; and if you
wish to understand what progress is, call it to-morrow. To-morrow ever
does its work irresistibly and does it to-day, and it ever strangely
attains its object. It employs Wellington to make an orator of Foy who
was only a soldier. Foy falls at Hougomont and raises himself in the
tribune. Such is the process of progress, and that workman has no bad
tools: it fits to its divine work the man who bestrode the Alps and the
old tottering patient of Père Élysée, and it employs both the gouty man
and the conqueror,--the conqueror externally, the gouty man at home.
Waterloo, by cutting short the demolition of thrones by the sword, had
no other effect than to continue the revolutionary work on another
side. The sabres have finished, and the turn of the thinkers arrives;
the age which Waterloo wished to arrest marched over it, and continued
its route, and this sinister victory was gained by liberty.
Still it is incontestable that what triumphed at Waterloo; what smiled
behind Wellington; what procured him all the marshals' staffs of
Europe, including, by the way, that of Marshal of France; what rolled
along joyously the wheelbarrows of earth mingled with bones to erect
the foundation for the lion, on whose pedestal is inscribed the date
June 18, 1815; what encouraged Blücher in cutting down the routed army;
and what from the plateau of Mont St. Jean hovered over France like a
prey,--was the counter-revolution. It is the counter-revolution that
muttered the hideous word "Dismemberment"; but on reaching Paris it had
a close view of the crater, it felt that the ashes burned its feet, and
it reflected. It went back to the job of stammering a charter.
Let us only see in Waterloo what there really is in it. There is no
intentional liberty, for the counter-revolution was involuntarily
liberal in the same way as Napoleon, through a corresponding
phenomenon, was involuntarily a Revolutionist. On June 18, 1815,
Robespierre on horseback was thrown.
CHAPTER XVIII.
RESTORATION OF DIVINE RIGHT.
With the fall of the Dictatorship, an entire European system crumbled
away, and the Empire vanished in a shadow which resembled that of the
expiring Roman world. Nations escaped from the abyss as in the time of
the Barbarians; but the Barbarism of 1815, which could be called by
its familiar name the counter-revolution, had but little breath, soon
began to pant, and stopped. The Empire, we confess, was lamented, and
by heroic eyes, and its glory consists in the sword-made sceptre; the
Empire was glory itself. It had spread over the whole earth all the
light that tyranny can give,--a dim light, we will say, an obscure
light; for when compared with real day, it is night. This disappearance
of the night produced the effect of an eclipse.
Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris, and the dances of July 8 effaced the
enthusiasm of March 20. The Corsican became the antithesis of the
Bearnais, and the flag on the dome of the Tuileries was white. The
exile was enthroned, and the deal table of Hartwell was placed before
the fleur-de-lysed easy-chair of Louis XIV. People talked of Bouvines
and Fontenoy as if they had occurred yesterday, while Austerlitz was
antiquated. The throne and the altar fraternized majestically, and
one of the most indubitable forms of the welfare of society in the
19th century was established in France and on the Continent,--Europe
took the white cockade. Trestaillon was celebrated, and the motto,
_nec pluribus impar_, reappeared in the stone beams representing a
sun on the front of the barracks, on the Quai d'Orsay. Where there
had been an Imperial Guard, there was a "red household;" and the arch
of the Carrousel, if loaded with badly endured victories, feeling not
at home in these novelties, and perhaps slightly ashamed of Marengo
and Arcola, got out of the difficulty by accepting the statue of the
Duc d'Angoulême. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a formidable public
grave in '93, was covered with marble and jasper, because the bones of
Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were mingled with that dust. In the
moat of Vincennes a tomb emerged from the ground, as a reminder that
the Duc d'Enghien died there in the same month in which Napoleon was
crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the ceremony very close upon
that death, tranquilly blessed the downfall, as he had blessed the
elevation. There was at Schönbrunn a shadow four years of age, whom it
was seditious to call the King of Rome. And these things took place,
and these kings regained their thrones, and the master of Europe was
put in a cage, and the old regime became the new, and the light and
the shadow of the earth changed places, because on the afternoon of a
summer day a peasant boy said to a Prussian in a wood, "Go this way and
not that!"
That 1815 was a sort of melancholy April; the old unhealthy and
venomous realities assumed a new aspect. Falsehood espoused
1789; divine right put on the mask of a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions, and after-thoughts, having
article fourteen in their hearts, varnished themselves with liberalism.
The snakes cast their slough. Man had been at once aggrandized and
lessened by Napoleon; idealism, in this reign of splendid materialism,
received the strange name of ideology. It was a grave imprudence of
a great man to ridicule the future; but the people, that food for
powder, so fond of the gunner, sought him. "Where is he? What is he
doing?" "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to an invalid of Marengo
and Waterloo. "He dead!" the soldier exclaimed; "much you know about
him!" Imaginations deified this thrown man. Europe after Waterloo
was dark, for some enormous gap was long left unfilled after the
disappearance of Napoleon. The kings placed themselves in this gap,
and old Europe took advantage of it to effect a reformation. There
was a holy alliance,--Belle Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had
said beforehand. In the presence of the old Europe reconstituted, the
lineaments of a new France were sketched in. The future, derided by
the Emperor, made its entry and wore on its brow the star--Liberty.
The ardent eyes of the youthful generation were turned toward it; but,
singular to say, they simultaneously felt equally attached to this
future Liberty and to the past Napoleon. Defeat had made the conquered
man greater; Napoleon fallen seemed better than Napoleon standing
on his feet. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him
guarded by Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montcheme. His
folded arms became the anxiety of thrones, and Alexander called him his
insomnia. This terror resulted from the immense amount of revolution he
had in him, and it is this which explains and excuses Buonapartistic
liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble, and kings sat
uneasily on their thrones, with the rock of St. Helena on the horizon.
While Napoleon was dying at Longwood, the sixty thousand men who fell
at Waterloo rotted calmly, and something of their peace spread over the
world. The Congress of Vienna converted it into the treaties of 1815,
and Europe called that the Restoration.
Such is Waterloo; but what does the Infinite care? All this tempest,
all this cloud, this war, and then this peace. All this shadow did not
for a moment disturb the flash of that mighty eye before which a grub,
leaping from one blade of grass to another, equals the eagle flying
from tower to tower at Notre Dame.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE BATTLE-FIELD BY NIGHT.
We must return, for it is a necessity of the story, to the fatal
battle-field of June 18, 1815. The moon shone brightly, and this
favored Blücher's ferocious pursuit, pointed out the trail of the
fugitives, surrendered this sad crowd to the Prussian cavalry, and
assisted the massacre. Such tragical complacency of the night is
witnessed at times in catastrophes. After the last cannon was fired
the plain of Mont St. Jean remained deserted. The English occupied the
French encampment, for the usual confirmation of victory is to sleep
in the beds of the conquered. They established their bivouac a little
beyond Rossomme, and while the Prussians followed up the fugitives,
Wellington proceeded to the village of Waterloo, to draw up his report
for Lord Bathurst. Were ever the _Sic vos non vobis_ applicable, it
is most certainly to this village of Waterloo, which did nothing, and
was half a league away from the action. Mont St. Jean was cannonaded,
Hougomont burned, Papelotte burned, Plancenoit burned, La Haye Sainte
carried by storm, and La Belle Alliance witnessed the embrace of the
two victors; but these names are scarce known, and Waterloo, which did
nothing during the battle, has all the honor of it.
We are not of those who flatter war, and when the opportunity offers,
we tell it the truth. War has frightful beauties which we have not
concealed; but it has also, we must allow, some ugly features. One of
the most surprising is the rapid stripping of the dead after victory;
the dawn that follows a battle always rises on naked corpses. Who does
this? Who sullies the triumph in this way? Whose is the hideous furtive
hand which slips into the pocket of victory? Who are the villains
dealing their stroke behind the glory? Some philosophers, Voltaire
among them, assert that they are the very men who have made the glory;
they say that those who keep their feet plunder those lying on the
ground, and the hero of the day is the vampire of the night. After
all, a man has the right to strip a corpse of which he is the author.
We do not believe it, however; reaping a crop of laurels and stealing
the shoes of a dead man do not seem to us possible from the same hand.
One thing is certain, that, as a usual rule, after the conquerors come
the thieves; but we must leave the soldier, especially the soldier of
to-day, out of the question.
Every army has a tail; and it is that which must be accused.
Batlike beings, half servants, half brigands, all the species of
the vespertilio which the twilight called war engenders, wearers of
uniform who do not fight, malingerers, formidable invalids, interloping
sutlers, trotting with their wives in small carts and stealing things
which they sell again, beggars offering themselves as guides to
officers, villains, marauders,--all these, armies marching in former
times (we are not alluding to the present day) had with them, so that,
in the special language, they were called "the stragglers." No army
and no nation was responsible for these beings,--they spoke Italian,
and followed the Germans; they spoke French, and followed the English.
It was by one of these scoundrels, a Spanish camp-follower who spoke
French, that the Marquis de Fervacques, deceived by his Picardy
accent, and taking him for a Frenchman, was killed and robbed on the
battle-field during the night that followed the victory of Cerisolles.
The detestable maxim, "Live on the enemy," produced this leprosy, which
strict discipline alone could cure. There are some reputations which
deceive, and we do not always know why certain generals, in other
respects great, became so popular. Turenne was adored by his troops,
because he tolerated plunder; evil permitted is kindness, and Turenne
was so kind that he allowed the Palatinate to be destroyed by sword
and fire. A larger or a smaller number of marauders followed an army,
according as the chief was more or less severe. Hoche and Morceau had
no camp-followers, and Wellington, we willingly do him the justice of
stating, had but few.
Still, on the night of June 18, the dead were stripped. Wellington was
strict; he ordered that everybody caught in the act should be shot, but
rapine is tenacious, and marauders plundered in one corner of the field
while they were being shot in the other. The moon frowned upon this
plain. About midnight a man was prowling, or rather crawling, about
the hollow road of Ohain: he was, according to all appearance, one of
those whom we have just described, neither English nor French, nor
peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul, attracted by the smell
of the dead, whose victory was robbery, and who had come to plunder
Waterloo. He was dressed in a blouse, which looked something like a
gown, was anxious and daring, and looked behind while he went onwards.
Who was this man? Night knew probably more about him than did day. He
had no bag, but evidently capacious pockets under his blouse. From time
to time he stopped, examined the plain around him as if to see whether
he was watched, bent down quickly, disturbed something lying silent and
motionless on the ground, and then drew himself up again and stepped
away. His attitude, and his rapid mysterious movements, made him
resemble those twilight _larvæ_ which haunt ruins, and which the old
Norman legends call "les alleurs;" certain nocturnal fowlers display
the same outline on the marshes.
Any one who had attentively examined would have seen behind the house
which stands at the intersection of the Nivelles and Mont St. Jean
roads, a sort of small vivandière's cart with a tilt of tarpaulin
stretched over wicker-work, drawn by a hungry-looking, staggering
horse, which was nibbling the nettles. In this cart, a woman was
seated on chests and bundles, and there was probably some connection
between this cart and the prowler. There was not a cloud in the sky,
and though the ground may be blood red, the moon remains white; that
is the indifference of nature. In the fields branches of trees broken
by cannon-balls, but still holding on by the bark, waved softly in
the night breeze. A breath shook the brambles, and there was a quiver
in the grass that resembled the departure of souls. In the distance
could be confusedly heard the march of the English patrols and rounds.
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte continued to burn, making, one in the
west, the other in the east, two large bodies of flames, to which were
joined the English bivouac fires, stretching along the hills on the
horizon, in an immense semicircle. The scene produced the effect of an
unfastened ruby necklace, with a carbuncle at either end.
We have described the catastrophe of the Ohain road; the heart is
chilled by the thought of what this death had been for so many brave
men. If there be anything frightful, if there exist a reality which
surpasses dreaming, it is this,--to live; to see the sun; to be in full
possession of manly vigor; to have health and joy; to laugh valiantly;
to run toward a glory glittering before you; to feel in your chest
lungs that breathe, a heart that beats, and a will that reasons; to
speak, to think, to hope, to love; to have a mother, a wife, and
children; to have light, and then suddenly, before there is time for a
cry, to be hurled into an abyss; to fall, roll, crush, and be crushed;
to see corn-stalks, flowers, leaves, and branches, and to be unable
to hold on to anything; to feel your sabre useless, men under you and
horses over you; to struggle in vain; to have your ribs fractured by
some kick in the gloom; to feel a heel on your eyes; to bite with rage
the horses' bits; to stifle, to yell, to writhe; to be underneath, and
to say to yourself, "A moment ago I was a living man!"
At the spot where this lamentable disaster occurred, all was now
silence. The hollow way was filled with an inextricable pile of horses
and their riders. There was no slope now, for the corpses levelled
the road with the plain, and came up flush to the top, like a fairly
measured bushel of barley. A pile of dead atop, a stream of blood at
bottom,--such was the road on the night of June 18, 1815. The blood ran
as far as the Nivelles road, and extravasated there in a wide pool, in
front of the barricade, at a spot which is still pointed out. It will
be remembered that the destruction of the cuirassiers took place at the
opposite point, near the Genappe road. The depth of the corpses was
proportionate to that of the hollow way; toward the middle, at the spot
where Delord's division passed, the layer of dead was thinner.
The nocturnal prowler, at whom we have allowed the reader a glance,
proceeded in that direction, searching this immense tomb. He looked
around and held a hideous review of the dead; he walked with his feet
in the blood. All at once he stopped. A few paces before him in the
hollow way, at the point where the pile of dead ended, an open hand,
illumined by the moon, emerged from a heap of men and horses. This
hand had on one finger something that glittered, and was a gold ring.
The man bent down, and when he rose again there was no longer a ring
on this finger. He did not exactly rise; he remained in a savage and
shy attitude, turning his back to the pile of dead, investigating the
horizon, supporting himself on his two forefingers, and his head spying
over the edge of the hollow way. The four paws of the jackal are suited
for certain actions. Then, making up his mind, he rose, but at the same
moment he started, for he felt that some one was holding him behind. He
turned and found that it was the open hand, which had closed and seized
the skirt of his coat. An honest man would have been frightened, but
this one began laughing.
"Hilloh!" he said, "it is only the dead man. I prefer a ghost to a
gendarme."
The hand, however, soon relaxed its hold, for efforts are quickly
exhausted in the tomb.
"Can this dead man be alive?" the marauder continued; "let me have a
look."
He bent down again, removed all the obstacles, seized the hand,
liberated the head, pulled out the body, and a few minutes later
dragged an inanimate or at least fainting man into the shadow of the
hollow way. He was an officer of cuirassiers of a certain rank, for a
heavy gold epaulette peeped out from under his cuirass. This officer
had lost his helmet, and a furious sabre-cut crossed his face, which
was covered with blood. He did not appear, however, to have any bones
broken, and through some fortunate accident,--if such a word be
possible here,--the dead had formed an arch over him so as to save him
from being crushed. His eyes were closed. He had on his cuirass the
silver cross of the Legion of Honor, and the prowler tore away this
cross, which disappeared in one of the gulfs he had under his blouse.
After this he felt the officer's fob, found a watch, and took it; then
he felt in his pockets and drew from them a purse. When he was at this
stage of the assistance he was rendering the dying man, the officer
opened his eyes.
"Thanks," he said feebly.
The roughness of the man's movements, the freshness of the night, and
the freely inhaled air had aroused him from his lethargy. The prowler
did not answer, but raised his head. A sound of footsteps could be
heard on the plain; it was probably some patrol approaching. The
officer murmured, for there was still the agony of death in his voice,--
"Who won the battle?"
"The English," the marauder answered.
The officer continued,--
"Feel in my pockets; you will find a purse and a watch, which you can
take."
Though this was already done, the prowler did what was requested, and
said,--
"There is nothing in them."
"I have been robbed," the officer continued; "I am sorry for it, as I
meant the things for you."
The footsteps of the patrol became more and more distinct.
"Some one is coming," the marauder said, preparing to go away.
The officer, raising his arm with difficulty, stopped him.
"You have saved my life; who are you?"
The prowler answered rapidly and in a low voice.
"I belong, like yourself, to the French army; but I must leave you, for
if I were caught I should be shot. I have saved your life, so now get
out of the scrape as you can."
"What is your rank?"
"Sergeant."
"Your name?"
"Thénardier."
"I shall not forget that name," the officer said; "and do you remember
mine; it is Pontmercy."
BOOK II
THE SHIP ORION.
CHAPTER I.
NO. 24,601 BECOMES NO. 9430.
Jean Valjean was recaptured. As our readers will probably thank us
for passing rapidly over painful details, we confine ourselves to the
quotation of two paragraphs published by the newspapers of the day,
a few months after the occurrence of the surprising events at M----.
These articles are rather summary, but it must be remembered that no
_Gazette des Tribunaux_ existed at that period. The first we take from
the _Drapeau Blanc_, dated July 25, 1823.
"A bailiwick of the Pas de Calais has just been the scene of an
uncommon event. A man, who was a stranger to the department and called
M. Madeleine, had some years previously revived by a new process an old
local trade,--the manufacture of jet and black beads. He made his own
fortune, and, let us add, that of the bailiwick, and in acknowledgment
of his services he was appointed Mayor. The police discovered that
M. Madeleine was no other than an ex-convict, who had broken his ban,
condemned in 1796 for robbery, of the name of Jean Valjean. He has
been sent back to the Bagne. It appears that prior to his arrest he
succeeded in withdrawing from M. Lafitte's a sum of more than half a
million, which he had banked there, and which it is said that he had
honestly acquired by his trade. Since his return to Toulon futile
efforts have been made to discover where this amount is concealed."
The second article, which is rather more detailed, is extracted from
the _Journal de Paris_ of the same date:--
"An ex-convict of the name of Jean Valjean has just been tried at the
Var assizes, under circumstances which attract attention. This villain
had succeeded in deceiving the vigilance of the police, and had behaved
so cleverly as to be made Mayor of one of our small towns in the north,
where he established a rather considerable trade. He was at length
unmasked, and arrested through the indefatigable zeal of the public
authorities. He had, as his concubine, a girl of the town, who died of
a fit at the moment of his arrest. This scoundrel, who is endowed with
Herculean strength, managed to escape but three or four days later the
police again captured him in Paris, at the moment when he was entering
one of those small coaches which run from the capital to the village
of Montfermeil (Seine et Oise). It is said that he took advantage of
these three or four days of liberty to withdraw from one of our chief
bankers an amount estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs.
According to the indictment he buried it at some spot only known to
himself, and it has not been found; but however this may be, this
Jean Valjean has just been tried at Var assizes for a highway robbery
committed with violence some eight years ago upon one of those honest
lads, who, as the patriarch of Ferney has said in immortal verse,--
'De Savoie arrivent tous les ans
Et dont la main légèrement essuie
Ces longs canaux engorgés par la suie.'
This bandit made no defence, but it was proved by the skilful and
eloquent organ of public justice that Jean Valjean was a member of a
band of robbers in the south. Consequently Valjean was found guilty
and sentenced to death. The criminal refused to appeal to the Court
of Cassation, but the King, in his inexhaustible mercy, deigned to
commute his sentence into penal servitude for life. Jean Valjean was
immediately removed to the galleys at Toulon."
It will not be forgotten that Jean Valjean had displayed religious
tendencies at M----, and some of the papers, among them the
_Constitutionnel_, regarded this commutation as a triumph of the Priest
party. Jean Valjean changed his number at Toulon, and was known as
9430. Let us state here once and for all that with M. Madeleine the
prosperity of M---- disappeared: all he had foreseen in his night
of hesitation and fever was realized; his absence was in truth the
absence of the soul. After his fall there took place at M---- that
selfish division of great fallen existences, that fatal break-up of
flourishing things, which is daily accomplished obscurely in the human
community, and which history has only noticed once because it occurred
after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants crown themselves kings;
overseers suddenly became manufacturers, and envious rivalries sprang
up. M. Madeleine's large work-shops were shut up; the buildings fell
into a ruinous condition, and the artisans dispersed, some leaving
the town, others the trade. All was henceforth done on a small scale
instead of a large one, for lucre instead of the public welfare. There
was no centre, but on all sides violent competition. M. Madeleine had
commanded and directed everything. When he fell, a spirit of contest
succeeded that of organization, bitterness succeeded cordiality, and
mutual hatred the good-will of the common founder. The threads tied
by M. Madeleine became knotted and broken; the process was falsified,
the articles became worse, and confidence was destroyed; the outlets
diminished, and there were fewer orders; wages fell, there were
stoppages, and lastly came bankruptcy.
The State itself perceived that some one had been crushed somewhere,
for less than four years after the sentence of the court identifying
M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean, to the profit of the galleys, the cost
of collecting the taxes was doubled in the bailiwick of M----. M. de
Villèle made a remark to that effect in the House in February, 1827.
CHAPTER II.
TWO LINES OF A DOUBTFUL ORIGIN.
Before going further we will enter into some details about a strange
fact that occurred at about the same period at Montfermeil, and which
may possibly possess some coincidence with certain police conjectures.
There is at Montfermeil a very old superstition, which is the more
curious and valuable because a popular superstition in the neighborhood
of Paris is like an aloe-tree in Siberia. We are of those who respect
everything which is in the condition of a rare plant. This, then, is
the Montfermeil superstition: it is believed that from time immemorial
the fiend has selected the forest as the spot where he buries his
treasure. Old women declare that it is not rare to meet at nightfall,
and in remote parts of the forest, a black man resembling a wagoner or
wood-cutter, dressed in wooden shoes and canvas trousers and blouse,
and recognizable from the fact that he has on his head two enormous
horns in place of cap or hat. This man is usually engaged in digging
a hole, and there are three modes of action in the event of meeting
him. The first is to go up to the man and address him; in that case you
perceive that he is simply a peasant, that he appears black because it
is twilight, that he is not digging a hole, but cutting grass for his
kine, and that what you had taken for horns is nothing but a dung-fork
he carries on his back, whose prongs seem to grow out of his head.
You go home and die within the week. The second plan is to watch him,
wait till he has dug his hole and filled it up and gone away; then you
run up to the hole and take out the treasure which the black man had
necessarily deposited in it. In this case you die within the month. The
last way is not to speak to the black man at all, not to look at him,
but run away at full speed, and you die within the year.
All three modes have their inconveniences; but the second, which
offers at any rate some advantages, among others that of possessing a
treasure, if only for a month, is the one most generally adopted. Bold
men whom chances tempt have consequently, so it is declared, frequently
reopened the hole dug by the black man, and robbed the demon. It seems,
however, as if the profits are small; at any rate if we may believe
tradition, and particularly and especially two enigmatical lines in
dog Latin, which a wicked Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer, and of the
name of Tryphon, left on the subject. This Tryphon lies at St. George's
Abbey at Bocherville near Rouen, and frogs are born on his tomb. A
man makes enormous exertions, then, for the holes are generally very
deep: he perspires, works the whole night through (for the operation
must be carried out at night), gets a wet shirt, burns out his candle,
breaks his pick, and when he at last reaches the bottom of the hole
and lays his hand on the treasure, what does he find? What is the
fiend's treasure? A sou, at times a crown-piece, a stone, a skeleton,
a bleeding corpse, or a spectre folded up like a sheet of paper in a
pocket-book, and sometimes nothing at all! This appears to be revealed
to the searchers by Tryphon's lines,--
"Fodit et in fossâ thesauros condit opacâ,
As, nummos, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque."
It seems that in our days there are also found sometimes a gunpowder
flask and balls, or an old pack of greasy, dirty cards which have
evidently been used by the fiends. Tryphon does not record these two
facts, because he lived in the 12th century, and it does not appear
that the fiend had the sense to invent gunpowder before Roger Bacon,
or playing cards before Charles VI. If you play with the cards you
are safe to lose all you possess; while the gunpowder displays the
peculiarity of making your gun burst in your face.
A very short time after the period when it occurred to the police that
Jean Valjean during his four days of liberty had been prowling round
Montfermeil, it was noticed in the same village that a certain old
road-mender of the name of Boulatruelle was "up to his tricks" in the
forest. It was believed generally that this Boulatruelle had been to
the galleys: he was to some extent under police inspection, and as he
could not find work anywhere, the administration employed him at a low
wage as mender of the cross-road from Gagny to Lagny. This Boulatruelle
was a man looked on askance by the villageois, as he was too
respectful, too humble, ready to doff his cap to everybody, trembling
and fawning before the gendarmes, and probably allied with the robbers,
so it was said, and suspected of lurking about the roads after dark.
The only thing in his favor was that he was a drunkard.
This is what people fancied that they noticed. For some time past
Boulatruelle had left work at an early hour, and gone into the forest
with his pickaxe. He was met toward evening in the most desolate
clearings, in the wildest thickets, apparently seeking something, and
at times digging holes. The old women who passed at first took him for
Beelzebub, and when they recognized Boulatruelle did not feel at all
more easy in mind. Such meetings greatly annoyed Boulatruelle, and
hence it was plain that he tried to hide himself, and that there was a
mystery in what he was doing. It was said in the village, "It is clear
that the fiend has made his appearance. Boulatruelle saw him, and is
seeking; well, he is cunning enough to pocket Lucifer's treasure." The
Voltairians added: "Will Boulatruelle cheat the devil, or the devil
cheat Boulatruelle?" while the old women crossed themselves repeatedly.
Boulatruelle, however, discontinued his forest rambles, and regularly
resumed his work, whereupon something else was talked about. Some
persons, however, remained curious, thinking that there was probably
in the affair, not the fabulous treasure of the legend, but something
more palpable and tangible than the fiend's bank-notes, and that the
road-mender had doubtless found out half the secret. The most puzzled
were the schoolmaster and Thénardier the publican, who was everybody's
friend, and had not disdained an intimacy with Boulatruelle.
"He has been to the galleys," Thénardier would say. "Well, good
gracious! we do not know who is there, or who may go there."
One evening the schoolmaster declared that in other times the
authorities would have inquired what Boulatruelle was about in the
wood, and that he would have been obliged to speak; they would have
employed torture if necessary, and Boulatruelle would not have resisted
the ordeal of water, for instance. "Let us give him the ordeal of
wine," said Thénardier. They set to work, and Boulatruelle drank
enormously, but held his tongue. He combined, with admirable tact and
in magisterial proportions, the thirst of a sponge with the discretion
of a judge. Still, by returning to the charge, and by putting together
the few obscure words that escaped him, this is what Thénardier and the
schoolmaster fancied that they could make out.
Boulatruelle, on going to work at daybreak one morning, was surprised
at seeing under a bush a spade and a pick, which "looked as if they
were hidden;" still he fancied that they belonged to Father Six-fours,
the water-carrier, and did not think any more of the matter. On the
evening of the same day, however, he saw, without being himself seen,
as he was hidden behind a tree, "an individual who did not belong to
these parts, and whom he, Boulatruelle, knew," proceeding toward the
most retired part of the wood. This Thénardier translated as "a comrade
at the galleys," but Boulatruelle obstinately refused to mention his
name. This individual was carrying a bundle, something square, like
a box or small chest. Boulatruelle was surprised; but it was not till
some ten minutes later that the idea of following the "individual"
occurred to him. But it was too late; the individual was already among
the trees, night had fallen, and Boulatruelle was unable to overtake
him. Then he resolved to watch the skirt of the wood, and the moon
was shining. Boulatruelle, some two or three hours after, saw this
individual come out of the wood, not carrying the box, however, but a
spade and pick. Boulatruelle allowed him to pass, and did not address
him, for he said to himself that the other man was thrice as strong as
he, and being armed with a pick would probably smash him on recognizing
him and finding himself recognized; a touching effusion on the part of
two old comrades who suddenly meet. But the spade and pick were a ray
of light for Boulatruelle; he hurried to the bush at daybreak, and no
longer found them there. From this he concluded that his individual, on
entering the wood, had dug a hole with his pick, buried his box in it,
and then covered it up with the spade. Now, as the box was too small
to contain a corpse, it must contain money, and hence his researches.
Boulatruelle explored the forest in all directions, and especially at
spots where the ground seemed to have been recently turned up, but it
was all of no use; he discovered nothing. Nobody in Montfermeil thought
any more of the matter, except some worthy gossips who said,--"You may
be sure that the road-mender did not take all that trouble for nothing;
it is certain that the fiend has been here."
CHAPTER III.
ON BOARD THE "ORION."
Toward the close of October, in the same year, 1823, the inhabitants of
Toulon saw a vessel enter their port which had sustained some damage in
a heavy storm. It was the "Orion," which at a later date was employed
at Brest as a training school, but now formed part of the Mediterranean
fleet. This vessel, battered as it was, for the sea had ill-treated
it, produced an effect on entering the roads. It displayed some flag
which obtained it the regulation salute of eleven guns, to which it
replied round for round,--a total of two-and-twenty rounds. It has been
calculated that in salvos, royal and military politeness, exchanges of
courtesy signals, formalities of roads and citadels, sunrise and sunset
saluted every day by all the fortresses and vessels of war, opening and
closing gates, etc., the civilized world fired every twenty-four hours,
and in all parts of the globe, one hundred and fifty thousand useless
rounds. At six francs the round, this makes 900,000 francs a day. Three
hundred millions a year expended in smoke. During this time poor people
are dying of starvation.
The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the Spanish
war." This war contained many events in one, and many singularities.
It was a great family affair for the House of Bourbon; the French
branch succoring and protecting the Madrid branch, that is to say,
proving its majority; an apparent return to national traditions,
complicated by servitude and subjection to the northern cabinets. The
Duc d'Angoulême, surnamed by the liberal papers the "hero of Andujar,"
repressing in a triumphal attitude, which what somewhat spoiled by his
peaceful looks, the old and very real terrorism of the Holy Office,
which was contending with the chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the
_sans culottes_ resuscitated to the great alarm of dowagers, under the
name of _Descamisados_; monarchy offering an obstacle to the progress
which it termed anarchy; the theories of '89 suddenly interrupted in
their sap; a European check given to the French idea which was making
its voyage round the world by the side of the Generalissimo son of
France; the Prince de Carignan, afterwards Charles Albert, enrolling
himself as a volunteer with the red wool epaulettes of a grenadier in
this crusade of the kings against the peoples; the soldiers of the
empire taking the field again, after eight years rest, aged, sad, and
wearing the white cockade; the tricolor waved in a foreign country by
an heroic handful of Frenchmen, as the white flag had been at Coblentz
thirty years previously; monks mingled with the French troopers;
the spirit of liberty and novelty set right by bayonets; principles
checkmated by artillery; France undoing by her arms what she had done
by her mind; the enemy's leaders sold; the soldiers hesitating; towns
besieged by millions; no military perils, and yet possible explosions,
as in every mine which is surprised and invaded; disgrace for a few
persons, and glory for none,--such was this war, brought about by
princes who descended from Louis XIV., and conducted by generals who
issued from Napoleon. It had the sad fate of recalling neither the
great war nor the great policy.
Some engagements were serious. The passage of the Trocadero, for
instance, was a brilliant military achievement; but on the whole, we
repeat, the trumpets of that war have a cracked sound, the whole affair
was suspicious, and history agrees with France in the difficulty of
accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident that certain Spanish
officers ordered to resist, yielded too easily, and the idea of
corruption was evolved from the victory; it seemed as if generals
rather than battles had been gained, and the victorious soldier
returned home humiliated. It was, in truth, a diminishing war, and
the words "Bank of France" could be read in the folds of the flag.
The soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom the ruins of Saragossa fell
so formidably, frowned in 1823 at the easy opening of citadel gates,
and began regretting Palafox. It is the humor of France to prefer a
Rostopchin before her rather than a Ballesteros. From a more serious
point of view, on which it is right to dwell here, this war, which
offended the military spirit in France, humiliated the democratic
spirit. It was undertaken on behalf of serfdom; in this campaign the
object of the French soldier, who was the son of democracy, was to bow
others under the yoke. This was a hideous mistake, for France has the
mission of arousing the soul of nations, and not stifling it. Since
1792 all the revolutions of Europe have been the French Revolution, and
liberty radiates from France. He must be blind who does not recognize
this. It was Bonaparte who said so.
The war of 1823, an attempt upon the generous Spanish nation, was
therefore at the same time an attack on the French Revolution. It
was France that committed this monstrous act of violence; for, with
the exception of wars of liberation, all that armies do they do by
force, as the words "passive obedience" indicate. An army is a strange
masterpiece of combination, in which strength results from an enormous
amount of impotence. In this way can we explain war carried on by
humanity against humanity, in spite of humanity. The war of 1823 was
fatal to the Bourbons; they regarded it as a triumph, for they did
not see what danger there is in killing an idea by a countersign.
In their simplicity they committed the mistake of introducing into
this establishment the immense weakness of a crime as an element of
strength; the spirit of ambuscading entered into their policy, and 1830
germinated in 1823. The Spanish campaign became in their councils an
argument for oppression, and the government by right divine. France,
having re-established _el rey neto_ in Spain, could establish the
absolute king at home. They fell into the formidable error of taking
the obedience of the soldier for the consent of the nation, and such a
confidence is the destruction of thrones. Men must go to sleep neither
in the shadow of a machineel-tree nor in that of an army.
Let us now return to the "Orion." During the operations of the
army commanded by the Prince generalissimo a squadron cruised in
the Mediterranean, to which, as we said, the "Orion" belonged, and
was driven into Toulon roads to repair damages. The presence of
a man-of-war in a port has something about it which attracts and
occupies the mob. It is grand, and the multitude love anything that is
grand. A vessel of the line is one of the most magnificent encounters
which the genius of man has with the might of nature; it is composed
simultaneously of what is the heaviest and lightest of things, because
it has to deal with three forms of substance at once,--the solid, the
liquid, and the fluid, and must contend against all three. It has
cloven iron claws to seize the granite of the sea-bed, and more wings
and antennæ than the two-winged insect to hold the wind. Its breath
issues from its one hundred and twenty guns as through enormous bugles,
and haughtily replies to the thunder. Ocean tries to lead it astray
in the frightful similitude of its waves; but the vessel has its soul
in its compass, which advises it and always shows it the north, and
on dark nights its lanterns take the place of the stars. Hence it has
tackle and canvas to oppose the wind, wood to oppose water, iron,
copper, and lead to oppose the rocks, light to oppose darkness, and
a needle to oppose immensity. If we wish to form an idea of all the
gigantic proportions whose _ensemble_ constitute a vessel of the line,
we need only enter one of the covered building-docks at Toulon or
Brest. The vessels in construction are there under glass, so to speak.
That colossal beam is a yard; that huge column of wood of enormous
length lying on the ground is the main-mast. Measuring from its root
in the keel to its truck in the clouds it is three hundred and sixty
feet in length, and is three feet in diameter at its base. The navy
of our fathers employed hemp cables, but ours has chains; the simple
pile of chain cable for a hundred-gun vessel is four feet high and
twenty feet in width. And then, again, in building such a vessel three
thousand loads of wood are used; it is a floating forest. And it must
not be left out of sight that we are here describing a man-of-war of
forty years ago, a simple sailing-vessel; steam, then in its infancy,
has since added new miracles to the prodigy which is called a vessel
of war. At the present day, for instance, the screw man-of-war is a
surprising machine, impelled by a surface of canvas containing three
thousand square yards, and a boiler of two thousand five hundred
horse power. Without alluding to these new marvels, the old vessel of
Christopher Columbus and De Ruyter is one of the great masterpieces
of man; it is inexhaustible in strength as infinity is in width; it
garners the wind in its sails, it is exact in the immense diffusion of
the waves; it floats, and it reigns.
And yet the hour arrives when a gust breaks like a straw this yard,
fifty feet in length; when the wind bends like a reed this mast, four
hundred feet in height; when this anchor, weighing thousands of
pounds, twists in the throat of the waves like a fisherman's hook in
the mouth of a pike; when these monstrous cannon utter plaintive and
useless groans, which the wind carries away into emptiness and night,
and when all this power and majesty are swallowed up by a superior
power and majesty. Whenever an immense force is displayed in attacking
immense weakness, it causes men to reflect. Hence at seaports curious
persons throng around these marvellous machines of war and navigation,
without exactly explaining the reason to themselves. Every day, then,
from morning till night, the quays and piers of Toulon were covered
with numbers of idlers, whose business it was to look at the "Orion."
This vessel had long been in a sickly state. During previous voyages
barnacles had collected on her hull to such an extent that she lost
half her speed; she had been taken into dry dock the year previous
to scrape off these barnacles, and then put to sea again. But this
scraping had injured the bolts, and when off the Balearic Isles, she
sprang a leak, and took in water, as vessels were not coppered in those
days. A violent equinoctial gale supervened, which injured her larboard
bows and destroyed the fore-chains. In consequence of this damage the
"Orion" put into Toulon, and anchored near the arsenal for repairs. The
hull was uninjured, but a few planks had been unnailed here and there
to let air in, as is usually the case.
One morning the crowd witnessed an accident. The crew were engaged in
bending the sails, and the top-man, who had charge of the starboard
tack of the main-top-sail, lost his balance. He was seen to totter,
the crowd on the arsenal quay uttered a cry, his head dragged him
downwards, and he turned round the yard, with his hands stretched down
to the water; but he caught hold of the foot-rope as he passed it,
first with one hand then with the other, and remained hanging from it.
The sea was below him at a dizzy depth, and the shock of his fall had
given the foot-rope a violent swinging movement. The man swung at the
end of the rope like a stone in a sling. To go to his assistance would
be running a frightful risk, and not one of the sailors, all coast
fishermen lately called in for duty, dared to venture it. Still the
unhappy top-man was growing tired: his agony could not be seen in his
face, but his exhaustion could be distinguished in all his limbs, and
his arms were awfully dragged. Any effort he made to raise himself only
caused the foot-rope to oscillate the more, and he did not cry out, for
fear of exhausting his strength. The minute was close at hand when he
must let go the rope, and every now and then all heads were turned away
not to see it happen. There are moments in which a rope, a pole, the
branch of a tree, is life itself, and it is a fearful thing to see a
living being let go of it and fall like ripe fruit. All at once a man
could be seen climbing up the shrouds with the agility of a tiger-cat.
As he was dressed in red, this man was a convict; as he wore a green
cap, he was a convict for life. On reaching the top a puff of wind blew
away his cap and displayed a white head; hence he was not a young man.
A convict, employed on board with a gang, had in fact at once run
up to the officer of the watch, and in the midst of the trouble
and confusion, while all the sailors trembled and recoiled, asked
permission to risk his life in saving the top-man. At a nod of assent
from the officer he broke with one blow of a hammer the chain riveted
to his ankle, took up a rope, and darted up the shrouds. No one noticed
at the moment with what ease this chain was broken; and the fact was
not remembered till afterwards. In a second he was upon the yard, where
he stood for a little while as if looking round him. These seconds,
during which the wind swung the top-man at the end of a thread, seemed
ages to the persons who were looking at him. At length the convict
raised his eyes to heaven and advanced a step. The crowd breathed
again, as they saw him run along the yard. On reaching the end he
fastened to it the rope he had brought with him, let it hang down,
and then began going down it hand over hand. This produced a feeling
of indescribable agony, for instead of one man hanging over the gulf,
there were now two. He resembled a spider going to seize a fly; but in
this case the spider brought life and not death. Ten thousand eyes were
fixed on the group: not a cry, not a word could be heard; every mouth
held its breath, as if afraid of increasing in the slightest degree the
wind that shook the two wretched men. The convict, in the interim, had
managed to get close to the sailor, and it was high time, for a minute
later the man, exhausted and desperate, would have let himself drop
into the sea. The convict fastened him securely with the rope to which
he clung with one hand, while he worked with the other. At length he
was seen to climb back to the yard and haul the sailor up: he supported
him there for a moment to let him regain his strength, then took him
in his arms and carried him along the yard to the cap, and thence to
the top, where he left him with his comrades. The crowd applauded him,
and several old sergeants of the chain-gang had tears in their eyes:
women embraced each other on the quay, and every voice could be heard
shouting with a species of frenzy,--"Pardon for that man!"
The convict, however, began going down again immediately to rejoin his
gang. In order to do so more rapidly he slid down a rope and ran along
a lower yard. All eyes followed him, and at one moment the spectators
felt afraid, for they fancied they could see him hesitate and totter,
either through fatigue or dizziness; all at once the crowd uttered
a terrible cry,--the convict had fallen into the sea. The fall was
a dangerous one, for the frigate "Algésiras" was anchored near the
"Orion," and the poor galley-slave had fallen between the two ships,
and might be sucked under one of them. Four men hastily got into a
boat, and the crowd encouraged them, for all felt anxious again. The
man did not come to the surface again, and disappeared in the sea
without making a ripple, just as if he had fallen into a barrel of
oil. They dragged for him, but in vain; they continued the search
till nightfall, but his body was not even found. The next day the
Toulon paper printed the following lines: "Nov. 17, 1823.--Yesterday
a convict, one of a gang on board the "Orion," fell into the sea and
was drowned, as he was returning from assisting a sailor. His body
has not been found, and is supposed to be entangled among the piles at
arsenal point. The man was imprisoned as No. 9430, and his name the
Jean Valjean."
BOOK III.
THE PROMISE TO THE DEAD FULFILLED.
CHAPTER I.
THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL.
Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern
slope of the lofty plateau which separates the Ourque from the Marne.
At the present day it is a rather large place, adorned with stucco
villas all the year round, and with holiday-making cits on Sunday. In
1823 there were neither so many white houses nor so many happy cits
as there are now, and it was merely a village in the woods. A visitor
certainly came across here and there a few country-houses of the last
century, recognizable by their air of pretension, their balconies
of twisted iron, and the tall windows, in which the little squares
produce all sorts of green hues on the white of the closed shutters.
But Montfermeil was not the less a village; retired cloth-dealers and
persons fond of country life had not yet discovered it. It was a quiet,
pleasant spot, which was not on a road to anywhere. Persons lived there
cheaply that peasant life which is so tranquil and abundant. The only
thing was that water was scarce, owing to the elevation of the plateau,
and it had to be fetched from some distance. That end of the village
which was on the Gagny side obtained its water from the splendid ponds
in the forest there; but the other end, which surrounds the church and
is on the Chelles side, could only obtain drinking-water from a little
spring about a quarter of an hour's walk from Montfermeil, near the
road to Chelles; laying in water was therefore a hard task for every
family. The large houses and the aristocracy, among which Thénardier's
pot-house may be reckoned, paid a liard a bucket to a man whose trade
it was, and who earned by it about eight sous a day. But this man only
worked till seven P.M. in summer, and till five in winter; and once
night had set in and the ground-floor shutters were closed, any person
who had no water to drink must either fetch it or go without.
This was the terror of the poor creature whom the reader will not have
forgotten, little Cosette. It will be remembered that Cosette was
useful to the Thénardiers in two ways,--they made the mother pay and
the child act as servant. Hence when the mother ceased payment, for
the reason which we know, the Thénardiers kept Cosette, who took the
place of a servant. In this quality she had to fetch water when it was
wanted, and the child, terrified at the idea of going to the spring
at night, was very careful that the house should never be without
water. Christmas of 1823 was peculiarly brilliant at Montfermeil; the
beginning of the winter was mild, and there had been neither snow
nor frost. Some mountebanks, who came from Paris, had obtained leave
from the mayor to erect their booth in the village high street, and a
party of travelling hawkers had put their stalls in the church square,
and even in the lane in which Thénardier's pot-house was situated.
This filled the inns and pot-houses, and produced a noisy, joyous
life in this quiet little place. As a faithful historian we are bound
to add that among the curiosities displayed in the market-place was
a menagerie, in which some ragged fellows showed the peasants of
Montfermeil one of those terrific Brazilian vultures of which the Paris
Museum did not possess a specimen till 1845, and which have a tricolor
cockade for an eye. Naturalists, I believe, call this bird Caracara
Polyborus; it belongs to the Apicide order and the vulture family. A
few old Bonapartist soldiers living in the village went to see this
bird with devotion, and the mountebanks declared that the tricolor
cockade was a unique phenomenon, and expressly produced by Nature for
their menagerie.
On the Christmas evening several carters and hawkers were sitting to
drink, round four or five candles, in Thénardier's tap-room. This room
was like those usually found in pot-houses; there were tables, pewter
pots, bottles, drinkers, and smokers, but little light, and a good
deal of uproar. The date of the year was, however, indicated by the
two objects, fashionable at that time among tradespeople, and which
were on a table,--a kaleidoscope and a lamp of clouded tin. Madame
Thénardier was watching the supper, which was roasting before a bright
clear fire, while her husband was drinking with his guests and talking
politics. In addition to the political remarks, which mainly referred
to the Spanish war and the Duc d'Angoulême, local parentheses like the
following could be heard through the Babel:--
"Over at Nanterre and Suresne the vintage has been very productive,
and where people expected ten barrels they have a dozen. The grapes
were very juicy when put under the press."--"But the grapes could
not have been ripe?"--"In these parts, they must not be picked ripe,
for the wine becomes oily in spring."--"Then it must be a very poor
wine?"--"There are poorer wines than those about here," etc.
Or else a miller exclaimed,--
"Are we responsible for what there is in the sack? We find a lot of
small seeds, which we can't waste time in sifting, and which must
pass under the mill-stones; such as tares, lucern, cockles, vetches,
amaranths, hemp-seed, and a number of other weeds, without counting
the pebbles which are so frequent in some sorts of wheat, especially
Breton wheat. I don't like grinding Breton wheat, any more than sawyers
like sawing beams in which there are nails. You can fancy the bad dust
all this makes in the hopper, and then people complain unfairly of the
flour, for it is no fault of ours."
Between two windows a mower seated at a table with a farmer, who was
making a bargain to have a field mown in spring, said,--
"There is no harm in the grass being damp, for it cuts better. But your
grass is tender, and hard to cut, sir, for it is so young, and bends
before the scythe," etc. etc.
Cosette was seated at her usual place, the cross-bar of the table, near
the chimney; she was in rags, her bare feet were thrust into wooden
shoes, and she was knitting, by the fire-light, stockings intended
for the young Thénardiers. Two merry children could be heard laughing
and prattling in an adjoining room; they were Éponine and Azelma. A
cat-o'-nine-tails hung from a nail by the side of the chimney. At
times, the cry of a baby somewhere in the house was audible through the
noise of the tap-room; it was a little boy Madame Thénardier had given
birth to one winter, "without knowing how," she used to say, "it was
the effect of the cold," and who was a little over three years of age.
The mother suckled him, but did not love him; when his cries became
too troublesome, Thénardier would say,--"There's your brat squalling;
go and see what he wants." "Bah!" the mother would answer, "he's a
nuisance;" and the poor deserted little wretch would continue to cry in
the darkness.
CHAPTER II
TWO FULL-LENGTH PORTRAITS.
Up to the present, only a side-view of the Thénardiers has been offered
the reader of this book; but the moment has now arrived to walk round
the couple and regard them on all sides. Thénardier had passed his
fiftieth year, Madame Thénardier was just on her fortieth, which is
fifty in a woman; and in this way there was a balance of age between
husband and wife. Our readers may probably have retained from the
first meeting some recollection of this tall, light-haired, red, fat,
square, enormous, and active woman; she belonged, as we said, to the
race of giantesses, who show themselves at fairs, with paving-stones
hanging from their hair. She did everything in the house; made the
beds, cleaned the rooms, was cook and laundress, produced rain and
fine weather, and played the devil. Her only assistant was Cosette,--a
mouse in the service of an elephant. All trembled at the sound of her
voice,--windows, furniture, and people; and her large face, dotted with
freckles, looked like a skimmer. She had a beard, and was the ideal of
a market porter dressed in female attire. She swore splendidly, and
boasted of being able to crack a walnut with a blow of her fist. Had it
not been for the romances she had read, and which at times made the
affected woman appear under the ogress, no one would ever have dreamed
of thinking that she was feminine. She seemed to be the product of a
cross between a young damsel and a fish fag. When people heard her
speak, they said,--"'T is a gendarme;" when they saw her drink, they
said,--"'T is a carter;" and when they saw her treatment of Cosette,
they said,--"'T is the hangman;" when she was quiet, a tooth projected
from her mouth.
Thénardier was a short, thin, sallow, angular, bony, weak man, who
looked ill, and was perfectly well--his cunning began with this. He
smiled habitually through caution, and was polite to nearly everybody,
even to the beggar whom he refused a halfpenny. He had the eye of a
ferret and the face of a man of letters, and greatly resembled the
portraits of Abbé Delille. His coquetry consisted in drinking with
carriers, and no one had ever been able to intoxicate him. He wore
a blouse and under it an old black coat, and had pretensions to
literature and materialism. There were some names he frequently uttered
in order to support an argument, such as Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and,
strangely enough, St. Augustine. He declared that he had "a system." He
was a thorough scamp, however. It will be remembered that he asserted
he had been a soldier, and told people with some pomp how at Waterloo,
where he was sergeant in the 6th or 9th light something, he alone,
against a squadron of Hussars of death, had covered with his body and
saved "a severely wounded general." Hence came his flaming sign,
and the name by which his house was generally known, "The Sergeant
of Waterloo." He was liberal, classical, and Bonapartist; he had
subscribed to the Champ d'Asile, and it was said in the village that he
had studied for the priesthood. We believe that he had simply studied
in Holland to be an inn-keeper. This scoundrel of a composite order
was in all probability some Fleming of Lille, a Frenchman at Paris, a
Belgian at Brussels, conveniently striding over two frontiers. We know
his prowess at Waterloo, and, as we see, he exaggerated slightly. Ebb
and flow and wandering adventures were the elements of his existence.
A tattered conscience entails an irregular life, and probably at the
stormy period of June 18, 1815, Thénardier belonged to that variety of
marauding sutlers to whom we have alluded, who go about the country
selling to some and robbing others, and moving about in a halting
cart after marching troops, with the instinct of always joining the
victorious army. When the campaign was over, having, as he said, "some
brads," he opened a pot-house at Montfermeil. These "brads," consisting
of purses and watches, gold rings and silver crosses, collected in
ditches filled with corpses, did not make a heavy total, and did not
carry very far this sutler turned inn-keeper.
Thénardier had something rectangular in his movements, which, when
joined to an oath, recalls the barrack,--to the sign of the cross, the
seminary. He was a clever speaker, and liked to be thought educated;
but the schoolmaster noticed that he made mistakes. He drew up a
traveller's bill in a masterly way, but practised eyes sometimes
found orthographical errors in it. Thénardier was cunning, greedy,
indolent, and skilful: he did not despise his servant-girls, and for
that reason his wife no longer kept any. This giantess was jealous,
and fancied that this little yellow man must be an object of universal
covetousness. Thénardier above all, as a crafty and well-balanced man,
was a villain of the temperate genus; and this breed is the worst,
as hypocrisy is mixed up in them. It was not that Thénardier was not
at times capable of passion, at least quite as much as his wife, but
it was very rare, and at such moments,--as he owed a grudge to the
whole human race, as he had within him a profound furnace of hatred,
as he was one of those persons who avenge themselves perpetually, who
accuse everybody who passes before them for what falls upon them, and
who are ever ready to cast on the first-comer, as a legitimate charge,
the whole of the annoyances, bankruptcies, and deceptions of their
life,--when all this leaven was working in him and boiling in his mouth
and eyes, he was fearful. Woe to the person who came under his fury at
such times.
In addition to his other qualities, Thénardier was attentive and
penetrating, silent or chattering according to occasion, and always
with great intelligence. He had the glance of sailors who are
accustomed to wink when looking through a telescope. Thénardier was a
statesman. Any new-comer, on entering the pot-house, said upon seeing
the woman, "That is the master of the house." Mistake. She was not
even the mistress, for her husband was both master and mistress. She
did and he created, he directed everything by a species of invisible
and continuous magnetic action; a word, sometimes a sign, from him
was sufficient, and the mastodon obeyed. The husband was to his wife,
though she did not know it, a species of peculiar and sovereign being.
However much she might dissent from "Monsieur Thénardier,"--an
inadmissible hypothesis,--she would have never proved him publicly in
the wrong for any consideration. She would never have committed "in
the presence of strangers" that fault which wives so often commit,
and which is called, in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown."
Although their agreement only resulted in evil, there was meditation
in Madame Thénardier's submission to her husband. This mountain of
noise and flesh moved under the little finger of this frail despot;
seen from its dwarfish and grotesque aspect, it was the great universal
thing,--adoration of matter for the mind. There was something strange
in Thénardier, and hence came the absolute dominion of this man over
this woman. At certain moments she saw him as a lighted candle, at
others she felt him as a claw. This woman was a formidable creature,
who only loved her children, and only feared her husband. She was a
mother because she was mammiferous; her maternity ceased, however, with
her girls, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys.
Thénardier himself had only one thought,--to enrich himself; but he did
not succeed, for a suitable stage was wanting for this great talent.
Thénardier ruined himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is possible at zero;
in Switzerland or the Pyrenees he would have become a millionnaire.
But where fate fastens a landlord he must browse. In this year, 1823,
Thénardier was in debt to the amount of 1500 francs, which rendered him
anxious. Whatever might be the obstinate injustice of destiny against
him, Thénardier was one of those men who thoroughly understand, and
in the most modern fashion, the theory which is a virtue in barbarous
nations, and an article of sale among civilized nations,--hospitality.
He was also an admirable poacher, and renowned for the correctness
of his aim, and he had a certain cold and peaceful laugh, which was
peculiarly dangerous.
His landlord theories burst forth from him at times in flashes, and he
had professional aphorisms which he drove into his wife's mind. "The
duty of a landlord," he said one day savagely, and in a low voice, "is
to sell to the first-comer ragouts, rest, light, fire, dirty sheets,
chamber-maids, fleas, and smiles; to arrest passers-by, empty small
purses, and honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter respectfully
travelling families, rasp the husband, peck the wife, and pluck the
children; to set a price on the open window, the shut window, the
chimney-corner, the easy-chair, the sofa, the stool, the feather-bed,
the mattress, and the bundle of straw; to know how much the reflection
wears off the looking-glass, and charge for it, and by the five hundred
thousand fiends to make the traveller pay for everything, even to the
flies his dog eats!"
This husband and this wife were craft and rage married, and formed a
hideous and terrible pair. While the husband ruminated and combined,
the she Thénardier did not think about absent creditors, had not
thought of yesterday or to-morrow, and lived violently only for the
moment. Such were these two beings, between whom Cosette stood,
enduring their double pressure, like a creature who was being at once
crushed by a mill-stone and torn with a pair of pincers. Man and wife
had each a different way. Cosette was beaten, that came from the wife;
she went about barefoot in winter, that came from the husband. Cosette
went up and down stairs, washed, brushed, scrubbed, swept, ran about,
panted for breath, moved heavy weights, and, little though she was, did
all the hard work. She could expect no pity from a ferocious mistress
and a venomous master, and the "Sergeant of Waterloo" was, as it were,
a web in which Cosette was caught and trembled. The ideal of oppression
was realized by this gloomy household, and it was something like a fly
serving spiders. The poor child was passively silent. What takes place
in these souls, which have just left the presence of God, when they
find themselves thus, in their dawn, all little and naked among human
beings?
CHAPTER III.
MEN WANT WINE AND HORSES WATER.
Four new travellers arrived. Cosette was sorrowfully reflecting; for
though only eight years of age she had already suffered so much that
she thought with the mournful air of an old woman. Her eye-lid was
blackened by a blow which the woman had given her, which made Madame
say now and then, "How ugly she is with her black eye!" Cosette was
thinking then that it was late, very late; that she had been suddenly
obliged to fill the jugs and bottles in the rooms of the travellers
who had just arrived, and that there was no water in the cistern. What
reassured her most was the fact that but little water was drunk at the
"Sergeant of Waterloo." There was no lack of thirsty souls, but it was
that sort of thirst which applies more readily to the wine-jar than
to the water-bottle. Any one who asked for a glass of water among the
glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men. At one
moment, however, the child trembled; her mistress raised the cover of
a stew-pan bubbling on a stove, then took a glass and hurried to the
cistern. The child had turned, and was watching all the movements. A
thin stream of water ran from the tap and filled the glass. "Hilloh!"
she add, "there is no water," Then she was silent for a moment, during
which the child did not breathe.
"Well," Madame Thénardier continued, as she examined the half-filled
glass, "this will be enough."
Cosette returned to her work, but for more than a quarter of an hour
she felt her heart beating in her chest. She counted the minutes that
passed thus, and wished that it were next morning. From time to time
one of the topers looked out into the street and said, "It's as black
as pitch," or "A man would have to be a cat to go into the street at
this hour without a lantern," and Cosette shivered. All at once one of
the pedlers lodging at the inn came in and said in a harsh voice,--
"My horse has had no water."
"Oh yes, it has," said Madame Thénardier.
"I tell you it has not, mother," the pedler went on.
Cosette had crept out from under the table.
"Oh yes, sir," she said, "your horse drank a bucketful, and I gave it
the water and talked to it."
This was not true.
"There's a girl no bigger than one's fist who tells a lie as big as a
house," the pedler exclaimed. "I tell you it has not had any water, you
little devil; it has a way of breathing which I know well when it has
not drunk."
Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse by agony, and
which was scarce audible,--
"Oh, indeed, the horse drank a lot."
"Enough of this," the pedler said savagely; "give my horse water."
Cosette went back under the table.
"Well, that is but fair," said Madame; "if the brute has not drunk it
ought to drink." Then she looked around her. "Why, where is the little
devil?"
She stooped down, and discovered Cosette hidden at the other end of the
table, almost under the feet of the topers.
"Come out of that!" her mistress shouted.
Cosette came out of the hole in which she had hidden herself, and the
landlady continued,--
"Miss What's-your-name, give the horse water."
"There is no water, Madame," Cosette said faintly.
Her mistress threw the street door wide open.
"Well, go and fetch some."
Cosette hung her head, and fetched an empty bucket standing in a corner
near the chimney; it was larger than herself, and she could have sat
down in it comfortably. Madame Thénardier returned to her stove and
tasted the contents of a stew-pan with a wooden spoon, while growling,--
"There's plenty at the spring. I believe it would have been better to
sift the onions."
Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained halfpence, pepper, and
shalots.
"Here, Miss Toad," she added, "as you come back, you will fetch a loaf
from the baker's. Here's a fifteen-sous piece."
Cosette had a small pocket in her apron, in which she placed the coin;
then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, and with the door open
before her. She seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her help.
"Be off!" her mistress shouted.
Cosette went out and shut the door after her.
CHAPTER IV.
A DOLL COMES ON THE STAGE.
The file of open-air shops, it will be remembered, ran as far as
Thénardier's inn. These stalls, owing to the approaching passage of
persons going to midnight mass, were all lit up with candles in paper
funnels, which, as the schoolmaster, who was seated at this moment in
Thénardier's tap-room, declared, produced a "magical effect." To make
up for this, not a star glittered in the sky. The last of these shops,
exactly facing Thénardier's door, was a child's toy establishment, all
flashing with tinsel, glass beads, and magnificent things in block-tin.
Right in front the dealer had placed upon a white napkin an enormous
doll, nearly two feet high, which was dressed in a pink crape gown,
with golden wheat-ears in her hair,--which was real hair,--and had
enamel eyes. The whole day had this marvel been displayed, to the
amazement of all passers-by under ten years of age; but not a mother in
Montfermeil had been rich enough or extravagant enough to give it to
her child, Éponine and Azelma had spent hours in contemplating it, and
even Cosette had ventured to take a furtive look at it.
At the moment when Cosette went out, bucket in hand, though she felt
so sad and desolate, she could not refrain from raising her eyes to
the prodigious doll, the "lady" as she called it. The poor child
stopped petrified, for she had not seen this doll so close before.
The whole stall seemed to her a palace, and this doll was not a doll,
but a vision. Joy, splendor, wealth, and happiness appeared in a sort
of chimerical radiance to the unhappy little creature who was deeply
buried in mournful and cold wretchedness. Cosette measured with the
simple and sad sagacity of childhood the abyss which separated her
from this doll. She said to herself that a person must be a queen or a
princess to have a "thing" like that. She looked at the fine dress, the
long smooth hair, and thought, "How happy that doll must be!" She could
not take her eyes off this fantastic shop, and the more she looked
the more dazzled she became, and she fancied she saw Paradise. There
were other dolls behind the large one, which appeared to her fairies
and genii. The tradesman, who walked about at the back of the shop,
seemed to her something more than mortal. In this adoration she forgot
everything, even the task on which she was sent; but suddenly the rough
voice of her mistress recalled her to the reality. "What, you little
devil, you have not gone! Just wait till I come to you, you little
viper!" Madame Thénardier had taken a look out into the street, and
noticed Cosette in ecstasy. The child ran off with her bucket, taking
enormous strides.
CHAPTER V.
THE LITTLE ONE ALONE.
As Thénardier's inn was in that part of the village near the church,
Cosette had to fetch the water from the spring in the forest on the
Chelles side. She did not look at another stall; so long as she was in
the lane and the vicinity of the church, the illuminated booths lit
up the road, but the last gleam of the last stall soon disappeared,
and the poor child found herself in darkness. She went farther into
it; but, as she felt some emotion while walking, she shook the handle
of her bucket as much as she could, which produced a noise that gave
her company. The farther she went, the more dense the gloom became;
there was no one in the streets except a woman, who turned on seeing
her pass, and muttered between her teeth, "Wherever can the child be
going? Can she be a goblin?" Then she recognized Cosette. "Why," she
said, "it is the Lark." Cosette in this way went through the labyrinth
of winding deserted streets which end the village of Montfermeil on
the side of Chelles; and so long as she had houses, or even walls on
both sides of the way, she walked rather boldly. From time to time
she saw a candle glimmering through the crack of a shutter; it was
light and life, people were there, and this reassured her. Still, in
proportion as she advanced, her step became slower, as if mechanical,
and when she had passed the corner of the last house, Cosette stopped.
Going beyond the last stall had been difficult, but going farther than
the last house became an impossibility. She put her bucket on the
ground, plunged her hand into her hair, and began scratching her head
slowly,--a gesture peculiar to terrified and undecided children. It was
no longer Montfermeil, but the fields, and black deserted space was
before her. She looked despairingly at this space in which there was
nobody, but where there were beasts, and there might be ghosts. She
looked out, and heard the beasts walking in the grass, and distinctly
saw the ghosts moving among the trees. Then she took her bucket again,
and fear gave her boldness. "Well," she said, "I will tell her that
there was no water;" and she boldly re-entered Montfermeil. She had
scarce gone one hundred yards when she stopped, and began scratching
her head again. Now it was her mistress who appeared to her,--her
hideous mistress with her hyena mouth, and her eyes flashing with
passion. The child took a lamentable glance before and behind her. What
should she do? What would become of her? Where should she go? It was
from her mistress she recoiled; she turned back in the direction of the
spring, and began running. She left the village running, she entered
the wood running, looking at nothing, hearing nothing. She did not stop
till breath failed her, but she still went on ahead, wildly. While
running she felt inclined to cry, for the nocturnal rustling of the
forest completely surrounded her. She did not think, she did not see;
the immensity of night was opposed to this little creature; on one side
was darkness, on the other an atom. It was only seven or eight minutes'
walk from the skirt of the wood to the spring, and Cosette knew the
road from having gone there several times by day. Strange to say, she
did not lose her way, for a remnant of instinct vaguely guided her;
still she did not look either to the right or left, for fear of seeing
things in the branches and shrubs. In this way she reached the spring;
it was a narrow natural basin hollowed by the water in the dry soil,
about two feet in depth, surrounded by moss and that gauffered grass
which is called Henri IV.'s ruff, and paved with a few heavy stones. A
rivulet escaped from it with a little gentle murmur.
Cosette did not take the time to breathe; it was very dark, but she
was accustomed to come to this fountain. She felt in the obscurity
for a young oak that leaned over the spring, and usually served her
as a support, caught a branch, stooped down, and plunged the bucket
into the water. She was in such a violent state that her strength was
tripled. While thus bent, she did not notice that the pocket of her
apron emptied itself into the stream, and that the fifteen-sous piece
fell into the water. Cosette neither saw nor heard it fall; she drew
up the bucket nearly full, and placed it on the grass. This done, she
felt that she was exhausted with fatigue; she would have liked to start
again at once, but the effect of filling the bucket had been so great
that she found it impossible to move a step. She fell on to the grass,
and lay there utterly exhausted. She shut her eyes, then opened them
again, not knowing why, but unable to do otherwise. By her side the
water stirring in the bucket made circles that resembled snakes of
white fire. Over her head the sky was covered with large black clouds,
which seemed like smoke; the tragic mask of the gloom seemed to bend
vaguely over this child. Jupiter was setting in the profundity; the
child gazed with a wondering eye at this large star, which she did
not know, and which terrified her. The planet, in fact, was at this
moment very near the horizon, and was passing through a dense fog,
which gave it a horrible redness. The fog, which was of a gloomy purple
hue, enlarged the planet and it looked like a luminous wound. A cold
wind blew from the plain; the wood was dark, but there was no rustling
of leaves, and none of the vague and fresh gleams of summer. Large
branches stood out frightfully, and shapeless, stunted bushes soughed
in the glades. The tall grass twined under the breeze like eels, and
the brambles writhed like long arms provided with claws seeking to
clutch their prey. A few withered patches of fern, impelled by the
breeze, passed rapidly, and seemed to be flying before something that
was coming up.
Darkness produces a dizziness. Man requires light, and any one who
enters the opposite of light, feels his heart contracted. When the eye
sees darkness, the soul sees trouble: in an eclipse, in night, in sooty
opaqueness, there is anxiety even for the strongest men. No one walks
alone at night in a forest without a tremor, for shadows and trees are
formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct
profundity; the inconceivable is visible a few paces from you with
spectral clearness. You see floating in space, or in your own brain,
something vague and intangible, like the dreams of sleeping flowers.
There are stern attitudes on the horizon, and you breathe the effluvia
of the great black vacuum. You feel frightened and inclined to look
behind you. The cavities of night, the silent outlines which disperse
as you advance, the irritated tufts, the lurid pools, the lugubrious
reflected in the mournful, the sepulchral immensity of silence, the
possible strange beings, the bending of mysterious branches, the
frightful torsos of trees, the long waves of quivering grass,--you
are defenceless against this. There is no man, however bold, who does
not shudder and feel this proximity of agony; something hideous is
experienced, as if the soul were amalgamated with the shades. This
penetration of darkness is indescribably sinister in a child. Forests
are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a little soul produces
a sound of death beneath their monstrous dome.
Without understanding what she experienced, Cosette felt herself
affected by this black enormity of nature: it was no longer terror
alone that over-powered her, but something even more terrible than
terror. She shuddered, and words fail us to describe the strange nature
of this shudder which chilled her to the heart. Her eye had become
stern, and she felt as if she could not prevent herself from returning
to the same spot on the morrow. Then, by a species of instinct, and in
order to emerge from this singular state which she did not understand,
but which terrified her, she began counting aloud one, two, three,
four, up to ten, and when she finished, she began again. This restored
her a true perception of the things that surrounded her: she felt the
coldness of her hands, which she had wetted in drawing the water. She
rose, for fear had seized upon her again, a natural and insurmountable
fear. She had only one thought left, to fly, fly at full speed through
the wood, and across the fields, as far as the houses, the windows,
and the lighted candles. Her eye fell on the bucket before her; and
such was the terror with which her mistress inspired her that she did
not dare fly without the bucket. She seized the handle with both hands
and found it difficult to lift. She proceeded thus for about a dozen
yards, but the bucket was full and heavy, and she was compelled to
set it on the ground. She breathed for a moment, and then lifted the
bucket and started again, this time going a little farther. But she was
still obliged to stop once more, and after a few moments' rest, set out
again. She walked with body bent forward and drooping head, like an old
woman, and the weight of the bucket stiffened her thin arms. The iron
handle swelled and froze her small white hands. From time to time she
was forced to stop, and each time she did so, the cold water from the
bucket plashed her bare legs. This occurred in the heart of a wood,
at night, in winter, far from any human eye. She was a child of eight
years of age, and God alone at this moment saw this sorrowful sight,
and her mother too, doubtless! for there are things which open the eyes
of the dead in their graves.
She breathed with a sort of dolorous rattle; sobs contracted her
throat, but she did not dare cry, for she was so afraid of her
mistress, even at a distance. It was her habit always to imagine Madame
Thénardier present. Still, she did not make much progress in this way,
and she walked very slowly, although she strove to lessen the length
of her halts and walk as long as she possibly could between them. She
thought with agony that it would take her more than an hour to get back
to Montfermeil in this way, and that her mistress would beat her. This
agony was mingled with her terror at being alone in the wood at night;
she was worn out with fatigue, and had not yet left the forest. On
reaching an old chestnut-tree which she knew, she made a longer halt
than the others to rest herself thoroughly; then she collected all her
strength, took up the bucket again, and began walking courageously.
Still the poor little creature in her despair could not refrain from
exclaiming,--"My God! my God!" All at once she suddenly felt that the
bucket no longer weighed anything; a hand which seemed to her enormous
had seized it, and was vigorously lifting it. She raised her head, and
saw a tall black form walking by her side; it was a man who had come
up behind her, and whom she had not heard. This man, without saying a
word, had seized the handle of the bucket which she was carrying. There
is an instinct in every meeting of this life. The child felt no fear.
CHAPTER VI.
BOULATRUELLE MAY HAVE BEEN RIGHT.
On the afternoon of this same Christmas day, 1823, a man walked for a
long time about the most desolate part of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital,
at Paris. He seemed to be looking for a lodging, and to stop for choice
at the most shabby houses in this skirt of the Faubourg St. Marceau.
As we shall see presently, this man had really hired a bed-room in
this isolated district. Both in dress and person he realized the type
of what might be called the respectable mendicant, or extreme misery
combined with extreme cleanliness. This is a very rare blending, which
inspires intelligent minds with the twofold respect which is felt
for the very poor and the very worthy man. He wore a very old and
carefully-brushed round hat, a threadbare coat of coarse yellow-ochre
colored cloth,--a color which was not absolutely odd at that day,--a
long waistcoat with enormous pockets, black breeches which had turned
gray at the knees, black worsted stockings, and stout shoes with brass
buckles. He looked like the ex-tutor of a good family returned from
emigration. From his white hair, wrinkled forehead, livid lips, and his
face in which everything revealed weariness of life, he might have
been supposed much beyond sixty years of age; but his firm though slow
step, and the singular vigor imprinted on all his movements, made him
look scarce fifty. The wrinkles on his forehead were well placed, and
would have favorably disposed any one who observed him closely; his lip
was contracted by a strange curve, which seemed stern, but was humble,
and there was a lugubrious serenity in his look. He carried in his left
hand a small parcel tied up in a handkerchief; and in his right he had
a stick cut from a hedge. This stick had been carved with some care,
and was not too bad-looking; advantage had been taken of the knots, and
a coral knob had been made with red sealing-wax,--it was a cudgel and
seemed a cane.
Few people pass along this boulevard, especially in winter; this
man, however, seemed to avoid rather than seek them, though without
affectation. At this period Louis XVIII. went almost daily to Choisy
le Roi, which was one of his favorite drives. At two o'clock the
royal carriage and escort could almost invariably be seen passing at
full gallop along the Boulevard de l'Hôpital. This did as well as a
clock or watch for the poor women of the district, who said, "It is
two o'clock, for he is returning to the Tuileries." And some ran up
and others drew up, for a king who passes always produces a tumult.
Moreover, the appearance and disappearance of Louis XVIII. produced a
certain effect in the streets of Paris, for it was rapid but majestic.
This impotent king had a taste for galloping; unable to walk, he wished
to run; and this cripple would have liked to be drawn by lightning.
He passed, peaceful and stern, amid drawn sabres; his heavy gilded
berline, with large branches of lilies painted on the panels, rolled
noisily along. There was scarce time to take a glance at him; you saw
in the right-hand corner a broad, firm, red face, a healthy forehead
powdered _à l'oiseau royal_, a proud, harsh, artful eye, an intelligent
smile, two heavy epaulettes with hanging fringe upon a civilian coat;
the golden fleece, the Cross of St. Louis, the Cross of the Legion of
Honor, the silver plate of the Holy Ghost, a large stomach, and a wide
blue ribbon,--it was the king. When out of Paris he carried his white
feathered hat on his knees, up to which came tall English gaiters; when
he returned to the city he put his hat on his head, and bowed rarely.
He looked at the people coldly, and they returned the compliment; when
he appeared for the first time in the Faubourg St. Marceau, his entire
success consisted in a remark made by a workman to his chum,--"That fat
man is the government."
The infallible passage of the king at the same hour was hence the daily
event of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital. The promenader in the yellow coat
plainly did not belong to that quarter, and probably not to Paris, for
he was ignorant of the fact. When at two o'clock the royal carriage,
surrounded by Life Guards with their silver aiguillettes, turned into
the boulevard, after coming round the Salpêtrière, he seemed surprised
and almost terrified. As he was alone in the walk, he quickly concealed
himself behind an angle of the wall; but this did not prevent the Duc
d'Havre from noticing him. As Captain of the Guards on duty that day,
he was seated in the carriage opposite to the king, and said to his
Majesty,--"There is an ill-looking fellow." The policemen, who cleared
the way for the king, also noticed him, and one of them received
orders to follow him. But the man turned into the solitary streets of
the Faubourg, and, as night was setting in, the agent lost his trail,
as is proved by a report addressed the same evening to Count Anglès,
Minister of State and Prefect of Police. When the man in the yellow
coat had thrown out the agent, he doubled his pace, though not without
looking back many times to make sure that he was not followed. At a
quarter-past four, that is to say, at nightfall, he passed in front
of the Porte St. Martin theatre, where the "Two Convicts" would be
performed that evening. This bill, lit up by theatre lamps, struck him,
for though he was walking rapidly, he stopped to read it. A moment
later he entered "The Pewter Platter," which was at that time the
office of the Lagny coach, which started at half-past four. The horses
were put in, and the passengers, summoned by the driver, were hastily
clambering up the iron steps of the vehicle. The man asked,--
"Have you a seat left?"
"Only one, by my side, on the box," the driver said.
"I will take it."
"Get up," the driver said.
Before starting, however, he took a glance at the passenger's poor
dress and the smallness of his bundle, and asked for the fare.
"Are you going all the way to Lagny?" he said.
"Yes," the man answered.
The traveller paid his fare to Lagny and the coach started. After
passing the city gate, the driver tried to get up a conversation, but
the traveller only answered in monosyllables; so the driver began
whistling and swearing at his horses. As the night was cold, he wrapped
himself in his cloak, but the passenger did not seem to notice it. At
about six o'clock they reached Chelles, where the driver stopped for a
moment to let his horses breathe, at an inn opened in the old buildings
of the Royal Abbey.
"I shall get down here," the man said.
He took his bundle and stick and jumped off the coach. A moment after
he had disappeared, but he did not enter the inn. When the coachman
started again a few moments after, he did not meet him in the high
street of Lagny, and he turned round to his inside passengers:--
"That man," he said, "does not belong to these parts, for I do not
know him. He looks as if he had not a penny; and yet he don't care for
money, as he paid his fare to Lagny and only came as far as Chelles. It
is night, all the houses are closed, he has not gone into the inn, and
yet I can't see him, so he must have sunk into the ground."
The man had not sunk into the ground, but walked hastily along the main
street of Chelles, in the darkness; then he turned to his left before
reaching the church, into a cross-road that runs to Montfermeil, like
a man who knows the country and had been there before. He followed this
road rapidly, and at the spot where it is intersected by the old road
that runs from Lagny to Gagny, he heard wayfarers coming. He hurriedly
concealed himself in a ditch, and waited till they
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