At dessert, champagne was served, and the commandant rose, and in the
same voice in which he would have drunk to the health of the Empress
Augusta, he drank: "To our ladies!" Then a series of toasts began,
toasts worthy of the lowest soldiers and of drunkards, mingled with
filthy jokes, which were made still more brutal by their ignorance of
the language. They got up, one after the other, trying to say something
witty, forcing themselves to be funny, and the women, who were so drunk
that they almost fell off their chairs, with vacant looks and clammy
tongues, applauded madly each time.
The captain, who no doubt wished to impart an appearance of gallantry
to the orgy, raised his glass again, and said: "To our victories over
hearts!" Thereupon Lieutenant Otto, who was a species of bear from the
Black Forest, jumped up, inflamed and saturated with drink, and seized
by an access of alcoholic patriotism, cried: "To our victories over
France!"
Drunk as they were, the women were silent, and Rachel turned round with
a shudder, and said: "Look here, I know some Frenchmen, in whose
presence you would not dare to say that." But the little count, still
holding her on his knees, began to laugh, for the wine had made him
very merry, and said: "Ha! ha! ha! I have never met any of them,
myself. As soon as we show ourselves, they run away!"
The girl, who was in a terrible rage, shouted into his face: "You are
lying, you dirty scoundrel!"
For a moment, he looked at her steadily, with his bright eyes upon her,
as he had looked at the portrait before he destroyed it with revolver
bullets, and then he began to laugh: "Ah! yes, talk about them, my
dear! Should we be here now, if they were brave?" Then getting excited,
he exclaimed: "We are the masters! France belongs to us!" She jumped
off his knees with a bound, and threw herself into her chair, while he
rose, held out his glass over the table, and repeated: "France and the
French, the woods, the fields, and the houses of France belong to us!"
The others, who were quite drunk, and who were suddenly seized by
military enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of brutes, seized their glasses,
and shouting, "Long live Prussia!" emptied them at a draught.
The girls did not protest, for they were reduced to silence, and were
afraid. Even Rachel did not say a word, as she had no reply to make,
and then the little count put his champagne glass, which had just been
refilled, on to the head of the Jewess, and exclaimed: "All the women
in France belong to us, also!"
At that she got up so quickly that the glass upset, spilling the amber
colored wine on to her black hair as if to baptize her, and broke into
a hundred fragments as it fell on to the floor. With trembling lips,
she defied the looks of the officer, who was still laughing, and she
stammered out, in a voice choked with rage: "That--that--that--is not
true,--for you shall certainly not have any French women."
He sat down again, so as to laugh at his ease, and trying ineffectually
to speak in the Parisian accent, he said: "That is good, very good!
Then what did you come here for, my dear?"
She was thunderstruck, and made no reply for a moment, for in her
agitation she did not understand him at first; but as soon as she
grasped his meaning, she said to him indignantly and vehemently: "I! I!
I am not a woman; I am only a strumpet, and that is all that Prussians
want."
Almost before she had finished, he slapped her full in her face; but as
he was raising his hand again as if he would strike her, she, almost
mad with passion, took up a small dessert knife from the table, and
stabbed him right in the neck, just above the breastbone. Something
that he was going to say, was cut short in his throat, and he sat
there, with his mouth half open, and a terrible look in his eyes.
All the officers shouted in horror, and leaped up tumultuously; but
throwing her chair between Lieutenant Otto's legs, who fell down at
full length, she ran to the window, opened it before they could seize
her, and jumped out into the night and pouring rain.
In two minutes, Mademoiselle Fifi was dead. Fritz and Otto drew their
swords and wanted to kill the women, who threw themselves at their feet
and clung to their knees. With some difficulty the major stopped the
slaughter, and had the four terrified girls locked up in a room under
the care of two soldiers. Then he organized the pursuit of the
fugitive, as carefully as if he were about to engage in a skirmish,
feeling quite sure that she would be caught.
The table, which had been cleared immediately, now served as a bed on
which to lay Fifi out, and the four officers made for the window, rigid
and sobered, with the stern faces of soldiers on duty, and tried to
pierce through the darkness of the night, amid the steady torrent of
rain. Suddenly, a shot was heard, and then another, a long way off; and
for four hours they heard, from time to time, near or distant reports
and rallying cries, strange words uttered as a call, in guttural voices.
In the morning they all returned. Two soldiers had been killed and
three others wounded by their comrades in the ardor of that chase, and
in the confusion of such a nocturnal pursuit, but they had not caught
Rachel.
Then the inhabitants of the district were terrorized, the houses were
turned topsy-turvy, the country was scoured and beaten up, over and
over again, but the Jewess did not seem to have left a single trace of
her passage behind her.
When the general was told of it, he gave orders to hush up the affair,
so as not to set a bad example to the army, but he severely censured
the commandant, who in turn punished his inferiors. The general had
said: "One does not go to war in order to amuse oneself, and to caress
prostitutes." And Graf von Farlsberg, in his exasperation, made up his
mind to have his revenge on the district, but as he required a pretext
for showing severity, he sent for the priest and ordered him to have
the bell tolled at the funeral of Count von Eyrick.
Contrary to all expectation, the priest showed himself humble and most
respectful, and when Mademoiselle Fifi's body left the Chateau
d'Urville on its way to the cemetery, carried by soldiers, preceded,
surrounded, and followed by soldiers, who marched with loaded rifles,
for the first time the bell sounded its funereal knell in a lively
manner, as if a friendly hand were caressing it. At night it sounded
again, and the next day, and every day; it rang as much as anyone could
desire. Sometimes even, it would start at night, and sound gently
through the darkness, seized by strange joy, awakened, one could not
tell why. All the peasants in the neighborhood declared that it was
bewitched, and nobody, except the priest and the sacristan would now go
near the church tower, and they went because a poor girl was living
there in grief and solitude, secretly nourished by those two men.
She remained there until the German troops departed, and then one
evening the priest borrowed the baker's cart, and himself drove his
prisoner to Rouen. When they got there, he embraced her, and she
quickly went back on foot to the establishment from which she had come,
where the proprietress, who thought that she was dead, was very glad to
see her.
A short time afterward, a patriot who had no prejudices, who liked her
because of her bold deed, and who afterward loved her for herself,
married her, and made a lady of her.
[1] Count.