rose hastily, for it was perhaps not correct for a lawyer to show
emotion; he went into the adjoining room, and came back with an unsealed
letter, which he gave to the Colonel. When the poor man held it in his
hand, he felt through the paper two gold pieces.
“Will you be good enough to describe the documents, and tell me the name
of the town, and in what kingdom?” said the lawyer.
The Colonel dictated the information, and verified the spelling of the
names of places; then he took his hat in one hand, looked at Derville,
and held out the other--a horny hand, saying with much simplicity:
“On my honor, sir, after the Emperor, you are the man to whom I shall
owe most. You are a splendid fellow!”
The attorney clapped his hand into the Colonel’s, saw him to the stairs,
and held a light for him.
“Boucard,” said Derville to his head clerk, “I have just listened to a
tale that may cost me five and twenty louis. If I am robbed, I shall not
regret the money, for I shall have seen the most consummate actor of the
day.”
When the Colonel was in the street and close to a lamp, he took the two
twenty-franc pieces out of the letter and looked at them for a moment
under the light. It was the first gold he had seen for nine years.
“I may smoke cigars!” he said to himself.
About three months after this interview, at night, in Derville’s room,
the notary commissioned to advance the half-pay on Derville’s account to
his eccentric client, came to consult the attorney on a serious matter,
and began by begging him to refund the six hundred francs that the old
soldier had received.
“Are you amusing yourself with pensioning the old army?” said the
notary, laughing--a young man named Crottat, who had just bought up
the office in which he had been head clerk, his chief having fled in
consequence of a disastrous bankruptcy.
“I have to thank you, my dear sir, for reminding me of that affair,”
replied Derville. “My philanthropy will not carry me beyond twenty-five
louis; I have, I fear, already been the dupe of my patriotism.”
As Derville finished the sentence, he saw on his desk the papers his
head clerk had laid out for him. His eye was struck by the appearance
of the stamps--long, square, and triangular, in red and blue ink, which
distinguished a letter that had come through the Prussian, Austrian,
Bavarian, and French post-offices.
“Ah ha!” said he with a laugh, “here is the last act of the comedy; now
we shall see if I have been taken in!”
He took up the letter and opened it; but he could not read it; it was
written in German.
“Boucard, go yourself and have this letter translated, and bring it back
immediately,” said Derville, half opening his study door, and giving the
letter to the head clerk.
The notary at Berlin, to whom the lawyer had written, informed him that
the documents he had been requested to forward would arrive within a
few days of this note announcing them. They were, he said, all perfectly
regular and duly witnessed, and legally stamped to serve as evidence
in law. He also informed him that almost all the witnesses to the facts
recorded under these affidavits were still to be found at Eylau, in
Prussia, and that the woman to whom M. le Comte Chabert owed his life
was still living in a suburb of Heilsberg.
“This looks like business,” cried Derville, when Boucard had given
him the substance of the letter. “But look here, my boy,” he went on,
addressing the notary, “I shall want some information which ought to
exist in your office. Was it not that old rascal Roguin--?”
“We will say that unfortunate, that ill-used Roguin,” interrupted
Alexandre Crottat with a laugh.
“Well, was it not that ill-used man who has just carried off eight
hundred thousand francs of his clients’ money, and reduced several
families to despair, who effected the settlement of Chabert’s estate? I
fancy I have seen that in the documents in our case of Ferraud.”
“Yes,” said Crottat. “It was when I was third clerk; I copied the papers
and studied them thoroughly. Rose Chapotel, wife and widow of Hyacinthe,
called Chabert, Count of the Empire, grand officer of the Legion of
Honor. They had married without settlement; thus, they held all the
property in common. To the best of my recollections, the personalty was
about six hundred thousand francs. Before his marriage, Colonel Chabert
had made a will in favor of the hospitals of Paris, by which he left
them one-quarter of the fortune he might possess at the time of his
decease, the State to take the other quarter. The will was contested,
there was a forced sale, and then a division, for the attorneys went at
a pace. At the time of the settlement the monster who was then governing
France handed over to the widow, by special decree, the portion
bequeathed to the treasury.”
“So that Comte Chabert’s personal fortune was no more than three hundred
thousand francs?”
“Consequently so it was, old fellow!” said Crottat. “You lawyers
sometimes are very clear-headed, though you are accused of false
practices in pleading for one side or the other.”
Colonel Chabert, whose address was written at the bottom of the
first receipt he had given the notary, was lodging in the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau, Rue du Petit-Banquier, with an old quartermaster of the
Imperial Guard, now a cowkeeper, named Vergniaud. Having reached the
spot, Derville was obliged to go on foot in search of his client, for
his coachman declined to drive along an unpaved street, where the ruts
were rather too deep for cab wheels. Looking about him on all sides,
the lawyer at last discovered at the end of the street nearest to the
boulevard, between two walls built of bones and mud, two shabby stone
gate-posts, much knocked about by carts, in spite of two wooden stumps
that served as blocks. These posts supported a cross beam with a
penthouse coping of tiles, and on the beam, in red letters, were the
words, “Vergniaud, dairyman.” To the right of this inscription were some
eggs, to the left a cow, all painted in white. The gate was open, and no
doubt remained open all day. Beyond a good-sized yard there was a house
facing the gate, if indeed the name of house may be applied to one of
the hovels built in the neighborhood of Paris, which are like nothing
else, not even the most wretched dwellings in the country, of which they
have all the poverty without their poetry.
Indeed, in the midst of the fields, even a hovel may have a certain
grace derived from the pure air, the verdure, the open country--a hill,
a serpentine road, vineyards, quickset hedges, moss-grown thatch and
rural implements; but poverty in Paris gains dignity only by horror.
Though recently built, this house seemed ready to fall into ruins. None
of its materials had found a legitimate use; they had been collected
from the various demolitions which are going on every day in Paris. On
a shutter made of the boards of a shop-sign Derville read the words,
“Fancy Goods.” The windows were all mismatched and grotesquely placed.
The ground floor, which seemed to be the habitable part, was on one
side raised above the soil, and on the other sunk in the rising ground.
Between the gate and the house lay a puddle full of stable litter, into
which flowed the rain-water and house waste. The back wall of this frail
construction, which seemed rather more solidly built than the rest,
supported a row of barred hutches, where rabbits bred their numerous
families. To the right of the gate was the cowhouse, with a loft above
for fodder; it communicated with the house through the dairy. To
the left was a poultry yard, with a stable and pig-styes, the roofs
finished, like that of the house, with rough deal boards nailed so as to
overlap, and shabbily thatched with rushes.
Like most of the places where the elements of the huge meal daily
devoured by Paris are every day prepared, the yard Derville now entered
showed traces of the hurry that comes of the necessity for being
ready at a fixed hour. The large pot-bellied tin cans in which milk
is carried, and the little pots for cream, were flung pell-mell at the
dairy door, with their linen-covered stoppers. The rags that were used
to clean them, fluttered in the sunshine, riddled with holes, hanging
to strings fastened to poles. The placid horse, of a breed known only
to milk-women, had gone a few steps from the cart, and was standing in
front of the stable, the door being shut. A goat was munching the shoots
of a starved and dusty vine that clung to the cracked yellow wall of the
house. A cat, squatting on the cream jars, was licking them over. The
fowls, scared by Derville’s approach, scuttered away screaming, and the
watch-dog barked.
“And the man who decided the victory at Eylau is to be found here!” said
Derville to himself, as his eyes took in at a glance the general effect
of the squalid scene.
The house had been left in charge of three little boys. One, who had
climbed to the top of the cart loaded with hay, was pitching stones into
the chimney of a neighboring house, in the hope that they might fall
into a saucepan; another was trying to get a pig into a cart, to hoist
it by making the whole thing tilt. When Derville asked them if M.
Chabert lived there, neither of them replied, but all three looked at
him with a sort of bright stupidity, if I may combine those two words.
Derville repeated his questions, but without success. Provoked by the
saucy cunning of these three imps, he abused them with the sort of
pleasantry which young men think they have the right to address to
little boys, and they broke the silence with a horse-laugh. Then
Derville was angry.
The Colonel, hearing him, now came out of the little low room, close to
the dairy, and stood on the threshold of his doorway with indescribable
military coolness. He had in his mouth a very finely-colored pipe--a
technical phrase to a smoker--a humble, short clay pipe of the kind
called “_brule-queule_.” He lifted the peak of a dreadfully greasy
cloth cap, saw Derville, and came straight across the midden to join his
benefactor the sooner, calling out in friendly tones to the boys:
“Silence in the ranks!”
The children at once kept a respectful silence, which showed the power
the old soldier had over them.
“Why did you not write to me?” he said to Derville. “Go along by the
cowhouse! There--the path is paved there,” he exclaimed, seeing the
lawyer’s hesitancy, for he did not wish to wet his feet in the manure
heap.
Jumping from one dry spot to another, Derville reached the door by which
the Colonel had come out. Chabert seemed but ill pleased at having to
receive him in the bed-room he occupied; and, in fact, Derville found
but one chair there. The Colonel’s bed consisted of some trusses of
straw, over which his hostess had spread two or three of those old
fragments of carpet, picked up heaven knows where, which milk-women
use to cover the seats of their carts. The floor was simply the trodden
earth. The walls, sweating salt-petre, green with mould, and full of
cracks, were so excessively damp that on the side where the Colonel’s
bed was a reed mat had been nailed. The famous box-coat hung on a nail.
Two pairs of old boots lay in a corner. There was not a sign of linen.
On the worm-eaten table the _Bulletins de la Grande Armee_, reprinted
by Plancher, lay open, and seemed to be the Colonel’s reading; his
countenance was calm and serene in the midst of this squalor. His visit
to Derville seemed to have altered his features; the lawyer perceived in
them traces of a happy feeling, a particular gleam set there by hope.
“Does the smell of the pipe annoy you?” he said, placing the dilapidated
straw-bottomed chair for his lawyer.
“But, Colonel, you are dreadfully uncomfortable here!”
The speech was wrung from Derville by the distrust natural to lawyers,
and the deplorable experience which they derive early in life from the
appalling and obscure tragedies at which they look on.
“Here,” said he to himself, “is a man who has of course spent my money
in satisfying a trooper’s three theological virtues--play, wine, and
women!”
“To be sure, monsieur, we are not distinguished for luxury here. It is
a camp lodging, tempered by friendship, but----” And the soldier shot a
deep glance at the man of law--“I have done no one wrong, I have never
turned my back on anybody, and I sleep in peace.”
Derville reflected that there would be some want of delicacy in asking
his client to account for the sums of money he had advanced, so he
merely said:
“But why would you not come to Paris, where you might have lived as
cheaply as you do here, but where you would have been better lodged?”
“Why,” replied the Colonel, “the good folks with whom I am living had
taken me in and fed me _gratis_ for a year. How could I leave them just
when I had a little money? Besides, the father of those three pickles is
an old _Egyptian_--”
“An Egyptian!”
“We give that name to the troopers who came back from the expedition
into Egypt, of which I was one. Not merely are all who get back
brothers; Vergniaud was in my regiment. We have shared a draught of
water in the desert; and besides, I have not yet finished teaching his
brats to read.”
“He might have lodged you better for your money,” said Derville.
“Bah!” said the Colonel, “his children sleep on the straw as I do. He
and his wife have no better bed; they are very poor you see. They
have taken a bigger business than they can manage. But if I recover my
fortune... However, it does very well.”
“Colonel, to-morrow or the next day, I shall receive your papers from
Heilsberg. The woman who dug you out is still alive!”
“Curse the money! To think I haven’t got any!” he cried, flinging his
pipe on the ground.
Now, a well-colored pipe is to a smoker a precious possession; but the
impulse was so natural, the emotion so generous, that every smoker, and
the excise office itself, would have pardoned this crime of treason to
tobacco. Perhaps the angels may have picked up the pieces.
“Colonel, it is an exceedingly complicated business,” said Derville as
they left the room to walk up and down in the sunshine.
“To me,” said the soldier, “it appears exceedingly simple. I was thought
to be dead, and here I am! Give me back my wife and my fortune; give me
the rank of General, to which I have a right, for I was made Colonel of
the Imperial Guard the day before the battle of Eylau.”
“Things are not done so in the legal world,” said Derville. “Listen to
me. You are Colonel Chabert, I am glad to think it; but it has to be
proved judicially to persons whose interest it will be to deny it.
Hence, your papers will be disputed. That contention will give rise to
ten or twelve preliminary inquiries. Every question will be sent under
contradiction up to the supreme court, and give rise to so many costly
suits, which will hang on for a long time, however eagerly I may push
them. Your opponents will demand an inquiry, which we cannot refuse, and
which may necessitate the sending of a commission of investigation to
Prussia. But even if we hope for the best; supposing that justice should
at once recognize you as Colonel Chabert--can we know how the questions
will be settled that will arise out of the very innocent bigamy
committed by the Comtesse Ferraud?
“In your case, the point of law is unknown to the Code, and can only be
decided as a point in equity, as a jury decides in the delicate cases
presented by the social eccentricities of some criminal prosecutions.
Now, you had no children by your marriage; M. le Comte Ferraud has two.
The judges might pronounce against the marriage where the family ties
are weakest, to the confirmation of that where they are stronger, since
it was contracted in perfect good faith. Would you be in a very becoming
moral position if you insisted, at your age, and in your present
circumstances, in resuming your rights over a woman who no longer loves
you? You will have both your wife and her husband against you, two
important persons who might influence the Bench. Thus, there are many
elements which would prolong the case; you will have time to grow old in
the bitterest regrets.”
“And my fortune?”
“Do you suppose you had a fine fortune?”
“Had I not thirty thousand francs a year?”
“My dear Colonel, in 1799 you made a will before your marriage, leaving
one-quarter of your property to hospitals.”
“That is true.”
“Well, when you were reported dead, it was necessary to make a
valuation, and have a sale, to give this quarter away. Your wife was not
particular about honesty as to the poor. The valuation, in which she no
doubt took care not to include the ready money or jewelry, or too
much of the plate, and in which the furniture would be estimated at
two-thirds of its actual cost, either to benefit her, or to lighten the
succession duty, and also because a valuer can be held responsible
for the declared value--the valuation thus made stood at six hundred
thousand francs. Your wife had a right of half for her share. Everything
was sold and bought in by her; she got something out of it all, and the
hospitals got their seventy-five thousand francs. Then, as the remainder
went to the State, since you had made no mention of your wife in your
will, the Emperor restored to your widow by decree the residue which
would have reverted to the Exchequer. So, now, what can you claim? Three
hundred thousand francs, no more, and minus the costs.”
“And you call that justice!” said the Colonel, in dismay.
“Why, certainly--”
“A pretty kind of justice!”
“So it is, my dear Colonel. You see, that what you thought so easy is
not so. Madame Ferraud might even choose to keep the sum given to her by
the Emperor.”
“But she was not a widow. The decree is utterly void----”
“I agree with you. But every case can get a hearing. Listen to me. I
think that under these circumstances a compromise would be both for her
and for you the best solution of the question. You will gain by it a
more considerable sum than you can prove a right to.”
“That would be to sell my wife!”
“With twenty-four thousand francs a year you could find a woman who, in
the position in which you are, would suit you better than your own wife,
and make you happier. I propose going this very day to see the Comtesse
Ferraud and sounding the ground; but I would not take such a step
without giving you due notice.”
“Let us go together.”
“What, just as you are?” said the lawyer. “No, my dear Colonel, no. You
might lose your case on the spot.”
“Can I possibly gain it?”
“On every count,” replied Derville. “But, my dear Colonel Chabert, you
overlook one thing. I am not rich; the price of my connection is not
wholly paid up. If the bench should allow you a maintenance, that is to
say, a sum advanced on your prospects, they will not do so till you
have proved that you are Comte Chabert, grand officer of the Legion of
Honor.”
“To be sure, I am a grand officer of the Legion of Honor; I had
forgotten that,” said he simply.
“Well, until then,” Derville went on, “will you not have to engage
pleaders, to have documents copied, to keep the underlings of the
law going, and to support yourself? The expenses of the preliminary
inquiries will, at a rough guess, amount to ten or twelve thousand
francs. I have not so much to lend you--I am crushed as it is by the
enormous interest I have to pay on the money I borrowed to buy my
business; and you?--Where can you find it.”
Large tears gathered in the poor veteran’s faded eyes, and rolled down
his withered cheeks. This outlook of difficulties discouraged him. The
social and the legal world weighed on his breast like a nightmare.
“I will go to the foot of the Vendome column!” he cried. “I will call
out: ‘I am Colonel Chabert who rode through the Russian square at
Eylau!’--The statue--he--he will know me.”
“And you will find yourself in Charenton.”
At this terrible name the soldier’s transports collapsed.
“And will there be no hope for me at the Ministry of War?”
“The war office!” said Derville. “Well, go there; but take a formal
legal opinion with you, nullifying the certificate of your death. The
government offices would be only too glad if they could annihilate the
men of the Empire.”
The Colonel stood for a while, speechless, motionless, his eyes fixed,
but seeing nothing, sunk in bottomless despair. Military justice is
ready and swift; it decides with Turk-like finality, and almost always
rightly. This was the only justice known to Chabert. As he saw the
labyrinth of difficulties into which he must plunge, and how much money
would be required for the journey, the poor old soldier was mortally hit
in that power peculiar to man, and called the Will. He thought it would
be impossible to live as party to a lawsuit; it seemed a thousand times
simpler to remain poor and a beggar, or to enlist as a trooper if any
regiment would pass him.
His physical and mental sufferings had already impaired his bodily
health in some of the most important organs. He was on the verge of one
of those maladies for which medicine has no name, and of which the seat
is in some degree variable, like the nervous system itself, the part
most frequently attacked of the whole human machine, a malady which may
be designated as the heart-sickness of the unfortunate. However serious
this invisible but real disorder might already be, it could still be
cured by a happy issue. But a fresh obstacle, an unexpected incident,
would be enough to wreck this vigorous constitution, to break the
weakened springs, and produce the hesitancy, the aimless, unfinished
movements, which physiologists know well in men undermined by grief.
Derville, detecting in his client the symptoms of extreme dejection,
said to him:
“Take courage; the end of the business cannot fail to be in your favor.
Only, consider whether you can give me your whole confidence and blindly
accept the result I may think best for your interests.”
“Do what you will,” said Chabert.
“Yes, but you surrender yourself to me like a man marching to his
death.”
“Must I not be left to live without a position, without a name? Is that
endurable?”
“That is not my view of it,” said the lawyer. “We will try a friendly
suit, to annul both your death certificate and your marriage, so as to
put you in possession of your rights. You may even, by Comte Ferraud’s
intervention, have your name replaced on the army list as general, and
no doubt you will get a pension.”
“Well, proceed then,” said Chabert. “I put myself entirely in your
hands.”
“I will send you a power of attorney to sign,” said Derville. “Good-bye.
Keep up your courage. If you want money, rely on me.”
Chabert warmly wrung the lawyer’s hand, and remained standing with his
back against the wall, not having the energy to follow him excepting
with his eyes. Like all men who know but little of legal matters, he was
frightened by this unforeseen struggle.
During their interview, several times, the figure of a man posted in the
street had come forward from behind one of the gate-pillars, watching
for Derville to depart, and he now accosted the lawyer. He was an old
man, wearing a blue waistcoat and a white-pleated kilt, like a brewer’s;
on his head was an otter-skin cap. His face was tanned, hollow-cheeked,
and wrinkled, but ruddy on the cheek-bones by hard work and exposure to
the open air.
“Asking your pardon, sir,” said he, taking Derville by the arm, “if I
take the liberty of speaking to you. But I fancied, from the look of
you, that you were a friend of our General’s.”
“And what then?” replied Derville. “What concern have you with him?--But
who are you?” said the cautious lawyer.
“I am Louis Vergniaud,” he replied at once. “I have a few words to say
to you.”
“So you are the man who has lodged Comte Chabert as I have found him?”
“Asking your pardon, sir, he has the best room. I would have given him
mine if I had had but one; I could have slept in the stable. A man
who has suffered as he has, who teaches my kids to read, a general,
an Egyptian, the first lieutenant I ever served under--What do you
think?--Of us all, he is best served. I shared what I had with him.
Unfortunately, it is not much to boast of--bread, milk, eggs. Well,
well; it’s neighbors’ fare, sir. And he is heartily welcome.--But he has
hurt our feelings.”
“He?”