Part 4

Did he not attempt to make Europe France; and after bearing our weight upon the earth until it changed the laws of gravitation, has he not left us poorer than the day he put his hand upon us? He who made an empire with his name, lost that name on the borders of his empire in a sea of blood and slaughtered men. A man all thought and action, who was able to comprehend both Desaix and Fouché.” “Despotic power and legal justice, each in due season, makes the true ruler,” said de Marsay. “But,” said the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the other women with a smile both dubious and satirical, “have we women really deteriorated as these gentlemen seem to think? Because today, under a system which belittles everything, you men like little dishes, little apartments, little paintings, little journals, little books, is that any reason why women should be less grand than they have been? Does the human heart change because you change your habits? In all epochs passions remain the same. I know splendid devotions, sublime endurances which lack publicity--fame, if you prefer to call it so. Many a woman is not less an Agnes Sorel because she never saved a king of France.

Do you think our Marquise d’Espard worth less than Madame Doublet or Madame du Deffand, in whose salon so much harm was said and done? Isn’t Taglioni the equal of Camargo? and Malibran of Saint-Huberti? Are not our poets superior to those of the eighteenth century? If, at this moment, thanks to the grocers who govern us, we have no style of our own, didn’t the Empire have a style as fully its own as that of Louis XV? And its splendor was surely fabulous. Have the arts and sciences lost ground?” “I agree with you, madame,” said Général de Montriveau. “In my opinion the women of this epoch are truly great. When posterity gives a verdict upon us will not Madame Recamier’s fame be equal to that of the loveliest women of past ages? We have made history so fast that we lack historians to write it down.

The reign of Louis XIV had but one Madame de Sévigné, while we have a thousand today in Paris who can write better letters, but do not publish them. Whether the French woman calls herself _femme comme il faut_ or great lady, she will always be the pre-eminent woman. Emile Blondet has made us a picture of the manners and charms of a woman of the present day; but, if occasion offered, this mincing, affected being, who plays a part and warbles out the ideas of Monsieur this, that, and the other, would show herself heroic! Even your faults, mesdames, seem the more poetic because they are and always will be hedged about with great dangers. I have seen much of the world, perhaps I have studied it too late; but, under circumstances in which the illegality of your sentiments might find excuse, I have always observed the effects of some chance--you may call it Providence if you like--which fatally overtake those women whom we call frail.” “I hope,” said Madame de Camps, “that we are able to be great in other ways.” “Oh, let the Marquis de Montriveau preach to us!” cried Madame de Sérizy. “All the more because he has preached by example,” said the Baronne de Nucingen. “Alas!” said Général de Montriveau, “of the many dramas--that’s a word you are constantly using,” he said with a nod to Blondet, “in which to my knowledge the hand of God has showed itself, the most terrible was one that was partly my own doing.” “Oh, tell it to us!” cried Lady Barimore. “I love to shudder.” “The taste of a virtuous woman,” said de Marsay replying to the charming daughter of Lord Dudley. “During the campaign of 1812,” said Général de Montriveau, “I was the involuntary cause of a terrible misfortune, which may serve you, Docteur Bianchon,” he said, turning to me--“you, who take so much note of the human mind while you study the human body--to solve certain of your riddles concerning the will. I was making my second campaign; I liked the danger and I laughed at everything, simple young lieutenant of artillery that I was! When we reached the Beresina the army no longer kept, as you know, any discipline; military obedience was at an end. A crowd of men of all nations was making its way instinctively from north to south.

Soldiers drove their bare-footed and ragged general from their camp-fires if he brought them neither wood nor provisions. After the passage of that famous river, the disorder was checked. I came out quietly, alone, without food, from the marshes of Zembin, and I walked along looking for a house where some one might be willing to admit me. Finding none all day, being driven away from those I came to, I fortunately saw late in the evening a miserable little Polish farmhouse, of which I can give you no idea unless you have seen the wooden houses of lower Normandy or the poorest hovels of La Beauce. These Polish dwellings consist of a single room, one end of which is divided off by a plank partition and serves as a storehouse for provisions. I saw in the twilight a light smoke rising from this building, and hoping to find comrades more compassionate than the persons I had hitherto approached, I marched boldly to the door. Entering, I found a table spread. Several officers, among whom was a woman (a not unusual sight), were eating potatoes and horse-flesh broiled on the embers, and frozen beets.

I recognized two or three captains of artillery belonging to the regiment in which I had first served. I was received with a volley of hails which would greatly have surprised me on the other side of the Beresina; but at this moment the cold was less intense, my comrades were resting, they were warm, they were eating, and piles of straw at the end of the room offered them the prospect of a delightful night. We didn’t ask for much in those days. My comrades could be generous gratis--a very common way of being generous, by the bye. At the end of the table, near the door which led into the small room filled with straw and hay, I saw my former colonel, one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met in the varied collection of men it has been my lot to know. He was an Italian. Whenever human beings are handsome in southern countries they are sublimely handsome. Have you ever noticed the peculiar whiteness of Italians when they are white?

It is magnificent, especially in the light. When I read the fantastic portrait Charles Nodier has given us of Colonel Oudet, I found my own impressions expressed in every sentence. Italian, like most of the officers of his regiment--borrowed by the Emperor from the army of Prince Eugène--my colonel was a man of great height, admirably proportioned, possibly a trifle too stout, but amazingly vigorous and light, agile as a greyhound. His black hair, curling profusely, set into brilliant relief a clear white skin like that of a woman. He had handsome feet, small hands, a charming mouth, and an aquiline nose with delicate lines, the tip of which contracted naturally and turned white when he was angry, which was often. His irascibility so passed all belief that I shall tell you nothing of it; you shall judge for yourself. No one was ever at ease in his presence. Perhaps I was the only man who did not fear him.

It is true that he had taken a singular liking to me; he thought whatever I did was good. When anger worked within him, his forehead contracted, his muscles stood out in the middle of it like the horse-shoe of Red-gauntlet. That sign would have terrified you more than the magnetic lightning of his blue eyes. His whole body would then quiver, and his strength, always so great in his normal condition, passed all bounds. He rolled his r’s excessively. His voice, certainly as powerful as that of Charles Nodier’s Oudet, gave an indescribable richness of sound to the syllable which contained that consonant. Though this vice of pronunciation was, in him, and at all times, a charm, you cannot imagine the power that accent, considered so vulgar in Paris, was capable of expressing when he commanded a maneuver, or was in any way excited. You must have heard it to understand it.

When the colonel was tranquil his blue eyes were full of angelic sweetness; his pure brow sparkled with an expression that was full of charm. At a parade of the Army of Italy no man could compare with him. Even d’Orsay himself, the handsome d’Orsay, was vanquished by our colonel at the last review held by Napoleon before his entrance into Russia. In this gifted man all was contradiction. Passion lives by contrasts. Therefore do not ask me whether he was conscious of those irresistible influences to which our nature” (the general looked toward the Princesse de Cadignan) “bends like molten glass beneath the blower’s pipe; but it so chanced that by some unusual fatality the colonel had had but few love-affairs, or had neglected to have them. To give you an idea of his violence, I will tell you in two words what I once saw him do in a fit of anger. We were marching with our cannon along a very narrow road, bordered on one side by woods and on the other by a rather steep bank.

Half way along this road we met another regiment of artillery, its colonel marching with it. This colonel wanted to make the captain of our regiment at the head of the first battery give way to his troop. Naturally our captain refused. But the colonel of the other regiment made a sign to his first battery to advance, and in spite of the care the first driver took to keep close into the woods the wheel of the gun carriage caught the right leg of our captain, broke it, and flung him to the other side of his horse. It was done in a moment. Our colonel, who happened to be at a little distance, saw the quarrel, and galloped furiously up through the trees and among the wheels at the risk of being flung with all his hoofs in the air, reaching the spot in face of the other colonel just as the captain cried out, ‘Help!’ and fell. No! our Italian colonel was no longer a man. Foam, like that of champagne, boiled from his mouth, he growled like a lion.

Incapable of uttering a word, even a cry, he made a dreadful sign to his adversary, pointing to the wood, and drew his sabre. They entered it. In two seconds we saw the other colonel on the ground with his head split in two. The soldiers of that regiment retreated, ha! the devil! and in quick time, too! Our captain, who just missed being killed, and who was yelping in the ditch where the wheel of the gun-carriage had flung him, had a wife, a charming Italian woman from Messina, who was not indifferent to our colonel. This circumstance had greatly increased his fury. His protection was due to the husband; he was bound to defend him as well as the wife. Now, in the miserable Polish cabin this side of Zembin, where, as I told you, I received such cordial welcome, this very captain sat opposite to me, and his wife was at the other end of the table opposite to the colonel.

She was a little woman, named Rosina, very dark, but bearing in her black eyes, shaped like almonds, all the ardor of the sun of Sicily. At this moment she was deplorably thin, her cheeks were covered with dust like a peach exposed to the weather on a high road. Scarcely clothed and all in rags, wearied by marches, her hair in disorder beneath the fragment of a shawl tied across her head, there was still all the presence of a woman about her; her movements were pretty, her rosy, dimpled mouth, her white teeth, the lines of her face and bust, charms which misery, cold, and want of care had not entirely effaced--still told of love and sweetness to anyone whose mind could dwell upon a woman. Rosina evidently possessed one of those natures which are fragile in appearance, but are full of nervous strength. The face of the husband, a Piedmontese nobleman, expressed a sort of jeering good-humor, if it is permissible to ally those two words. Brave, intelligent and educated, he nevertheless seemed to ignore the relations which had existed between his wife and the colonel for nearly three years. I attributed this indifference to the strange customs of Italy, or to some secret in their own home; but there was in the man’s face one feature which had always inspired me with involuntary distrust. His underlip, thin and very flexible, turned down at its two extremities instead of turning up, which seemed to me to reveal an underlying cruelty in a character apparently phlegmatic and indolent.

You can well imagine that the conversation was not brilliant when I entered. My weary comrades were eating in silence, but they naturally asked me a few questions; and we related our several misfortunes, mingling them with reflections on the campaign, the generals, their blunders, the Russians, and the cold. Soon after my arrival, the colonel, having finished his meagre meal, wiped his mustache, wished us good-night, cast his black eye toward the woman, and said, ‘Rosina.’ Then without awaiting any reply he went into the space partitioned off for forage. The meaning of his summons was evident; and the young woman made an indescribable gesture, which expressed both the annoyance that she felt at seeing her dependance thus exhibited without respect for human feelings, and her sense of the affront offered to her dignity as a woman and to her husband. And yet in the strained expression of her features and in the violent contraction of her eyebrows, there seemed to be a sort of foreboding; perhaps a presentiment of her fate came over her. Rosina continued to sit tranquilly at the table; a moment later the colonel’s voice was heard repeating her name, ‘Rosina!’ The tone of this new summons was even more brutal than that of the first. The rolling accent of the colonel’s voice and the echo which the Italian language gives to vowels and final letters revealed in a startling manner the tyranny, impatience, and will of that man. Rosina turned pale, but she rose, passed behind us, and joined the colonel.

All my comrades maintained a rigid silence; but I, unhappily, after looking round at them, began to laugh, and the laugh was then repeated from mouth to mouth. ‘You laugh?’ said the husband. ‘Faith, comrade,’ I replied, becoming serious, ‘I did wrong, I admit it; I ask ten thousand pardons; and if you are not content with such excuses I am ready to give you satisfaction.’ ‘It is not you who have done wrong, it is I,’ he replied coldly. Thereupon we all shook down our straw about the room and were soon lost in the sleep of weariness. The next day each man, without awaking his neighbor, without looking for a journeying companion, started on his way with that utter egotism which made our retreat from Russia one of the most horrible dramas of personality, sadness, and horror which ever took place beneath the heavens. Yet after each man had gone some seven or eight hundred yards from our night’s lodging, we came together and marched along like geese led in flocks by the unconscious dominance of a child. A common necessity was driving us along. When we reached a slight elevation from which we could see the house where we had passed the night, we heard sounds that resembled the roaring of lions in the desert or the bellowing of bulls; but no! that clamor could not be compared to any known sound. Mingled with that horrible and sinister roar came the feeble cry of a woman. We all turned round, seized with a sensation--I know not how to describe it--of fear; the house was no longer visible, only a burning pile; the building, which someone had barricaded, was in flames.

Clouds of smoke, driven by the wind, rolled toward us, bringing raucous sounds and a strong indescribable odor. A few steps from us marched the captain, who had quietly joined our caravan; we looked at him in silence, for none of us dared question him. But he, divining our curiosity, touched his breast with the forefinger of his right hand and pointed with the left to the conflagration. ‘Son io!’ he said. We continued our way without another word to him.” “There is nothing more fearful than the revolt of sheep,” said de Marsay. “It would be too dreadful to let us part with that horrible scene in our minds,” said Madame de Montcornet. “I shall dream of it.” “Tell us, before we go, what punishment befell Monsieur de Marsay’s first love,” said Lord Dudley, smiling. “When Englishmen jest their foils are buttoned,” remarked Emile Blondet. “Monsieur Bianchon can tell you that,” replied de Marsay, turning to me. “He saw her die.” “Yes,” I said, “and her death was one of the most beautiful I ever witnessed. The duke and I had passed the night beside the pillow of the dying woman, whose disease, consumption, was then in its final stages; no hope remained, and she had received the last offices of the Church the preceding evening. The duke had fallen asleep. Madame la duchesse, waking about four in the morning, made me, in a touching manner and with a smile, a tender little sign to let him sleep; and yet she felt she was about to die! She had reached a stage of extraordinary thinness, but her face preserved its features, and its outlines were truly sublime.

Her pallor made her skin resemble porcelain behind which a light has been placed. Her brilliant eyes and the color in her cheeks shone out upon this skin so softly beautiful, while the whole countenance seemed to breathe forth a commanding tranquility. Evidently she pitied the duke, and the feeling took its rise in a lofty sentiment which seemed to see no limit in the approach of death. The silence was profound. The chamber, softly lighted by a lamp, had the appearance of all sick-chambers at the moment of death. At that instant the clock struck. The duke awoke, and was in despair at having slept. I did not see the gesture of impatience with which he showed the regret he felt at having lost his wife from sight during the few last moments granted to him; but it is certain that any other person than the dying woman might have been mistaken about him.

A statesman, preoccupied with the interests of France, the duke had many of those apparent oddities which often make men of genius pass for fools, though the explanation may be found in the exquisite nature and requirements of their mind. He now took a chair beside the bed and looked fixedly at his wife. The dying woman put out her hand and took that of her husband which she pressed gently, saying in a soft but trembling voice: “‘My poor friend, who will understand you in the future?’ “So saying, she died, looking at him.” [Footnote 1: Translated by George Milburn.] [Footnote 2: “As it should be”--correct, ideal, perfect.] [Footnote 3: “As it shouldn’t be,” the opposite of _comme il faut_.] =TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES= Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.