The retreat from Moscow submerged all private feelings in a sea of
disaster and misery. Colonels without regiments, D'Hubert and Feraud
carried the musket in the ranks of the so-called sacred battalion--a
battalion recruited from officers of all arms who had no longer any
troops to lead.
In that battalion promoted colonels did duty as sergeants; the generals
captained the companies; a marshal of France, Prince of the Empire,
commanded the whole. All had provided themselves with muskets picked
up on the road, and with cartridges taken from the dead. In the general
destruction of the bonds of discipline and duty holding together the
companies, the battalions, the regiments, the brigades, and divisions
of an armed host, this body of men put its pride in preserving some
semblance of order and formation. The only stragglers were those who
fell out to give up to the frost their exhausted souls. They plodded
on, and their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of the plains,
shining with the livid light of snows under a sky the colour of
ashes. Whirlwinds ran along the fields, broke against the dark column,
enveloped it in a turmoil of flying icicles, and subsided, disclosing it
creeping on its tragic way without the swing and rhythm of the military
pace. It struggled onwards, the men exchanging neither words nor looks;
whole ranks marched touching elbow, day after day and never raising
their eyes from the ground, as if lost in despairing reflections. In the
dumb, black forests of pines the cracking of overloaded branches was the
only sound they heard. Often from daybreak to dusk no one spoke in the
whole column. It was like a macabre march of struggling corpses towards
a distant grave. Only an alarm of Cossacks could restore to their eyes a
semblance of martial resolution. The battalion faced about and deployed,
or formed square under the endless fluttering of snowflakes. A cloud of
horsemen with fur caps on their heads, levelled long lances, and yelled
"Hurrah! Hurrah!" around their menacing immobility whence, with muffled
detonations, hundreds of dark red flames darted through the air thick
with falling snow. In a very few moments the horsemen would disappear,
as if carried off yelling in the gale, and the sacred battalion standing
still, alone in the blizzard, heard only the howling of the wind, whose
blasts searched their very hearts. Then, with a cry or two of "Vive
l'Empereur!" it would resume its march, leaving behind a few lifeless
bodies lying huddled up, tiny black specks on the white immensity of the
snows.
Though often marching in the ranks, or skirmishing in the woods side
by side, the two officers ignored each other; this not so much from
inimical intention as from a very real indifference. All their store of
moral energy was expended in resisting the terrific enmity of nature and
the crushing sense of irretrievable disaster. To the last they counted
among the most active, the least demoralized of the battalion; their
vigorous vitality invested them both with the appearance of an heroic
pair in the eyes of their comrades. And they never exchanged more than
a casual word or two, except one day, when skirmishing in front of the
battalion against a worrying attack of cavalry, they found themselves
cut off in the woods by a small party of Cossacks. A score of
fur-capped, hairy horsemen rode to and fro, brandishing their lances
in ominous silence; but the two officers had no mind to lay down their
arms, and Colonel Feraud suddenly spoke up in a hoarse, growling voice,
bringing his firelock to the shoulder. "You take the nearest brute,
Colonel D'Hubert; I'll settle the next one. I am a better shot than you
are."
Colonel D'Hubert nodded over his levelled musket. Their shoulders were
pressed against the trunk of a large tree; on their front enormous
snowdrifts protected them from a direct charge. Two carefully aimed
shots rang out in the frosty air, two Cossacks reeled in their saddles.
The rest, not thinking the game good enough, closed round their wounded
comrades and galloped away out of range. The two officers managed to
rejoin their battalion halted for the night. During that afternoon they
had leaned upon each other more than once, and towards the end, Colonel
D'Hubert, whose long legs gave him an advantage in walking through
soft snow, peremptorily took the musket of Colonel Feraud from him and
carried it on his shoulder, using his own as a staff.
On the outskirts of a village half buried in the snow an old wooden
barn burned with a clear and an immense flame. The sacred battalion
of skeletons, muffled in rags, crowded greedily the windward side,
stretching hundreds of numbed, bony hands to the blaze. Nobody had
noted their approach. Before entering the circle of light playing on the
sunken, glassy-eyed, starved faces, Colonel D'Hubert spoke in his turn:
"Here's your musket, Colonel Feraud. I can walk better than you."
Colonel Feraud nodded, and pushed on towards the warmth of the fierce
flames. Colonel D'Hubert was more deliberate, but not the less bent on
getting a place in the front rank. Those they shouldered aside tried
to greet with a faint cheer the reappearance of the two indomitable
companions in activity and endurance. Those manly qualities had never
perhaps received a higher tribute than this feeble acclamation.
This is the faithful record of speeches exchanged during the retreat
from Moscow by Colonels Feraud and D'Hubert. Colonel Feraud's
taciturnity was the outcome of concentrated rage. Short, hairy, black
faced, with layers of grime and the thick sprouting of a wiry beard,
a frost-bitten hand wrapped up in filthy rags carried in a sling, he
accused fate of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man of Destiny.
Colonel D'Hubert, his long moustaches pendent in icicles on each side of
his cracked blue lips, his eyelids inflamed with the glare of snows, the
principal part of his costume consisting of a sheepskin coat looted
with difficulty from the frozen corpse of a camp follower found in an
abandoned cart, took a more thoughtful view of events. His regularly
handsome features, now reduced to mere bony lines and fleshless hollows,
looked out of a woman's black velvet hood, over which was rammed
forcibly a cocked hat picked up under the wheels of an empty army
fourgon, which must have contained at one time some general officer's
luggage. The sheepskin coat being short for a man of his inches ended
very high up, and the skin of his legs, blue with the cold, showed
through the tatters of his nether garments. This under the circumstances
provoked neither jeers nor pity. No one cared how the next man felt or
looked. Colonel D'Hubert himself, hardened to exposure, suffered mainly
in his self-respect from the lamentable indecency of his costume. A
thoughtless person may think that with a whole host of inanimate bodies
bestrewing the path of retreat there could not have been much difficulty
in supplying the deficiency. But to loot a pair of breeches from a
frozen corpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist. It
requires time and labour. You must remain behind while your companions
march on. Colonel D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. Once he
had stepped aside he could not be sure of ever rejoining his battalion;
and the ghastly intimacy of a wrestling match with the frozen dead
opposing the unyielding rigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant
to the delicacy of his feelings. Luckily, one day, grubbing in a mound
of snow between the huts of a village in the hope of finding there a
frozen potato or some vegetable garbage he could put between his long
and shaky teeth, Colonel D'Hubert uncovered a couple of mats of the
sort Russian peasants use to line the sides of their carts with. These,
beaten free of frozen snow, bent about his elegant person and fastened
solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nether garment, a sort of
stiff petticoat, which rendered Colonel D'Hubert a perfectly decent, but
a much more noticeable figure than before.
Thus accoutred, he continued to retreat, never doubting of his personal
escape, but full of other misgivings. The early buoyancy of his belief
in the future was destroyed. If the road of glory led through such
unforeseen passages, he asked himself--for he was reflective--whether
the guide was altogether trustworthy. It was a patriotic sadness, not
unmingled with some personal concern, and quite unlike the unreasoning
indignation against men and things nursed by Colonel Feraud. Recruiting
his strength in a little German town for three weeks, Colonel D'Hubert
was surprised to discover within himself a love of repose. His returning
vigour was strangely pacific in its aspirations. He meditated silently
upon this bizarre change of mood. No doubt many of his brother officers
of field rank went through the same moral experience. But these were
not the times to talk of it. In one of his letters home Colonel D'Hubert
wrote, "All your plans, my dear Leonie, for marrying me to the charming
girl you have discovered in your neighbourhood, seem farther off than
ever. Peace is not yet. Europe wants another lesson. It will be a hard
task for us, but it shall be done, because the Emperor is invincible."
Thus wrote Colonel D 'Hubert from Pomerania to his married sister
Leonie, settled in the south of France. And so far the sentiments
expressed would not have been disowned by Colonel Feraud, who wrote
no letters to anybody, whose father had been in life an illiterate
blacksmith, who had no sister or brother, and whom no one desired
ardently to pair off for a life of peace with a charming young girl.
But Colonel D 'Hubert's letter contained also some philosophical
generalities upon the uncertainty of all personal hopes, when bound up
entirely with the prestigious fortune of one incomparably great it is
true, yet still remaining but a man in his greatness. This view would
have appeared rank heresy to Colonel Feraud. Some melancholy forebodings
of a military kind, expressed cautiously, would have been pronounced as
nothing short of high treason by Colonel Feraud. But Leonie, the sister
of Colonel D'Hubert, read them with profound satisfaction, and, folding
the letter thoughtfully, remarked to herself that "Armand was likely to
prove eventually a sensible fellow." Since her marriage into a Southern
family she had become a convinced believer in the return of the
legitimate king. Hopeful and anxious she offered prayers night and
morning, and burnt candles in churches for the safety and prosperity of
her brother.
She had every reason to suppose that her prayers were heard. Colonel
D'Hubert passed through Lutzen, Bautzen, and Leipsic losing no limb, and
acquiring additional reputation. Adapting his conduct to the needs of
that desperate time, he had never voiced his misgivings. He concealed
them under a cheerful courtesy of such pleasant character that people
were inclined to ask themselves with wonder whether Colonel D'Hubert
was aware of any disasters. Not only his manners, but even his glances
remained untroubled. The steady amenity of his blue eyes disconcerted
all grumblers, and made despair itself pause.
This bearing was remarked favourably by the Emperor himself; for Colonel
D'Hubert, attached now to the Major-General's staff, came on several
occasions under the imperial eye. But it exasperated the higher strung
nature of Colonel Feraud. Passing through Magdeburg on service,
this last allowed himself, while seated gloomily at dinner with the
Commandant de Place, to say of his life-long adversary: "This man does
not love the Emperor," and his words were received by the other guests
in profound silence. Colonel Feraud, troubled in his conscience at
the atrocity of the aspersion, felt the need to back it up by a good
argument. "I ought to know him," he cried, adding some oaths. "One
studies one's adversary. I have met him on the ground half a dozen
times, as all the army knows. What more do you want? If that isn't
opportunity enough for any fool to size up his man, may the devil take
me if I can tell what is." And he looked around the table, obstinate and
sombre.
Later on in Paris, while extremely busy reorganizing his regiment,
Colonel Feraud learned that Colonel D'Hubert had been made a general. He
glared at his informant incredulously, then folded his arms and turned
away muttering, "Nothing surprises me on the part of that man."
And aloud he added, speaking over his shoulder, "You would oblige me
greatly by telling General D'Hubert at the first opportunity that his
advancement saves him for a time from a pretty hot encounter. I was only
waiting for him to turn up here."
The other officer remonstrated.
"Could you think of it, Colonel Feraud, at this time, when every life
should be consecrated to the glory and safety of France?"
But the strain of unhappiness caused by military reverses had spoiled
Colonel Feraud's character. Like many other men, he was rendered wicked
by misfortune.
"I cannot consider General D'Hubert's existence of any account either
for the glory or safety of France," he snapped viciously. "You don't
pretend, perhaps, to know him better than I do--I who have met him half
a dozen times on the ground--do you?"
His interlocutor, a young man, was silenced. Colonel Feraud walked up
and down the room.
"This is not the time to mince matters," he said. "I can't believe that
that man ever loved the Emperor. He picked up his general's stars under
the boots of Marshal Berthier. Very well. I'll get mine in another
fashion, and then we shall settle this business which has been dragging
on too long."
General D'Hubert, informed indirectly of Colonel Feraud's attitude, made
a gesture as if to put aside an importunate person. His thoughts were
solicited by graver cares. He had had no time to go and see his family.
His sister, whose royalist hopes were rising higher every day, though
proud of her brother, regretted his recent advancement in a measure,
because it put on him a prominent mark of the usurper's favour, which
later on could have an adverse influence upon his career. He wrote
to her that no one but an inveterate enemy could say he had got his
promotion by favour. As to his career, he assured her that he looked no
farther forward into the future than the next battlefield.
Beginning the campaign of France in this dogged spirit, General D'Hubert
was wounded on the second day of the battle under Laon. While being
carried off the field he heard that Colonel Feraud, promoted this moment
to general, had been sent to replace him at the head of his brigade.
He cursed his luck impulsively, not being able at the first glance to
discern all the advantages of a nasty wound. And yet it was by this
heroic method that Providence was shaping his future. Travelling slowly
south to his sister's country home under the care of a trusty old
servant, General D'Hubert was spared the humiliating contacts and the
perplexities of conduct which assailed the men of Napoleonic empire at
the moment of its downfall. Lying in his bed, with the windows of his
room open wide to the sunshine of Provence, he perceived the undisguised
aspect of the blessing conveyed by that jagged fragment of a Prussian
shell, which, killing his horse and ripping open his thigh, saved him
from an active conflict with his conscience. After the last fourteen
years spent sword in hand in the saddle, and with the sense of his duty
done to the very end, General D'Hubert found resignation an easy virtue.
His sister was delighted with his reasonableness. "I leave myself
altogether in your hands, my dear Leonie," he had said to her.
He was still laid up when, the credit of his brother-in-law's family
being exerted on his behalf, he received from the royal government not
only the confirmation of his rank, but the assurance of being retained
on the active list. To this was added an unlimited convalescent leave.
The unfavourable opinion entertained of him in Bonapartist circles,
though it rested on nothing more solid than the unsupported
pronouncement of General Feraud, was directly responsible for General
D'Hubert's retention on the active list. As to General Feraud, his rank
was confirmed, too. It was more than he dared to expect; but Marshal
Soult, then Minister of War to the restored king, was partial to
officers who had served in Spain. Only not even the marshal's protection
could secure for him active employment. He remained irreconcilable,
idle, and sinister. He sought in obscure restaurants the company of
other half-pay officers who cherished dingy but glorious old tricolour
cockades in their breast-pockets, and buttoned with the forbidden eagle
buttons their shabby uniforms, declaring themselves too poor to afford
the expense of the prescribed change.
The triumphant return from Elba, an historical fact as marvellous and
incredible as the exploits of some mythological demi-god, found General
D'Hubert still quite unable to sit a horse. Neither could he walk very
well. These disabilities, which Madame Leonie accounted most lucky,
helped to keep her brother out of all possible mischief. His frame
of mind at that time, she noted with dismay, became very far from
reasonable. This general officer, still menaced by the loss of a limb,
was discovered one night in the stables of the chateau by a groom,
who, seeing a light, raised an alarm of thieves. His crutch was lying
half-buried in the straw of the litter, and the general was hopping on
one leg in a loose box around a snorting horse he was trying to saddle.
Such were the effects of imperial magic upon a calm temperament and
a pondered mind. Beset in the light of stable lanterns, by the tears,
entreaties, indignation, remonstrances and reproaches of his family, he
got out of the difficult situation by fainting away there and then in
the arms of his nearest relatives, and was carried off to bed. Before he
got out of it again, the second reign of Napoleon, the Hundred Days of
feverish agitation and supreme effort, passed away like a terrifying
dream. The tragic year 1815, begun in the trouble and unrest of
consciences, was ending in vengeful proscriptions.
How General Feraud escaped the clutches of the Special Commission and
the last offices of a firing squad he never knew himself. It was partly
due to the subordinate position he was assigned during the Hundred Days.
The Emperor had never given him active command, but had kept him busy
at the cavalry depot in Paris, mounting and despatching hastily drilled
troopers into the field. Considering this task as unworthy of his
abilities, he had discharged it with no offensively noticeable zeal; but
for the greater part he was saved from the excesses of Royalist reaction
by the interference of General D'Hubert.
This last, still on convalescent leave, but able now to travel, had been
despatched by his sister to Paris to present himself to his legitimate
sovereign. As no one in the capital could possibly know anything of the
episode in the stable he was received there with distinction. Military
to the very bottom of his soul, the prospect of rising in his profession
consoled him from finding himself the butt of Bonapartist malevolence,
which pursued him with a persistence he could not account for. All the
rancour of that embittered and persecuted party pointed to him as the
man who had never loved the Emperor--a sort of monster essentially worse
than a mere betrayer.
General D'Hubert shrugged his shoulders without anger at this ferocious
prejudice. Rejected by his old friends, and mistrusting profoundly the
advances of Royalist society, the young and handsome general (he was
barely forty) adopted a manner of cold, punctilious courtesy, which
at the merest shadow of an intended slight passed easily into harsh
haughtiness. Thus prepared, General D'Hubert went about his affairs in
Paris feeling inwardly very happy with the peculiar uplifting happiness
of a man very much in love. The charming girl looked out by his sister
had come upon the scene, and had conquered him in the thorough manner
in which a young girl by merely existing in his sight can make a man of
forty her own. They were going to be married as soon as General D'Hubert
had obtained his official nomination to a promised command.
One afternoon, sitting on the terrasse of the Cafe Tortoni, General
D'Hubert learned from the conversation of two strangers occupying
a table near his own, that General Feraud, included in the batch of
superior officers arrested after the second return of the king, was in
danger of passing before the Special Commission. Living all his spare
moments, as is frequently the case with expectant lovers, a day in
advance of reality, and in a state of bestarred hallucination, it
required nothing less than the name of his perpetual antagonist
pronounced in a loud voice to call the youngest of Napoleon's generals
away from the mental contemplation of his betrothed. He looked round.
The strangers wore civilian clothes. Lean and weather-beaten, lolling
back in their chairs, they scowled at people with moody and defiant
abstraction from under their hats pulled low over their eyes. It was not
difficult to recognize them for two of the compulsorily retired officers
of the Old Guard. As from bravado or carelessness they chose to speak in
loud tones, General D'Hubert, who saw no reason why he should change his
seat, heard every word. They did not seem to be the personal friends of
General Feraud. His name came up amongst others. Hearing it repeated,
General D'Hubert's tender anticipations of a domestic future adorned
with a woman's grace were traversed by the harsh regret of his warlike
past, of that one long, intoxicating clash of arms, unique in the
magnitude of its glory and disaster--the marvellous work and the special
possession of his own generation. He felt an irrational tenderness
towards his old adversary and appreciated emotionally the murderous
absurdity their encounter had introduced into his life. It was like an
additional pinch of spice in a hot dish. He remembered the flavour with
sudden melancholy. He would never taste it again. It was all over. "I
fancy it was being left lying in the garden that had exasperated him so
against me from the first," he thought, indulgently.
The two strangers at the next table had fallen silent after the third
mention of General Feraud's name. Presently the elder of the two,
speaking again in a bitter tone, affirmed that General Feraud's account
was settled. And why? Simply because he was not like some bigwigs who
loved only themselves. The Royalists knew they could never make anything
of him. He loved The Other too well.
The Other was the Man of St. Helena. The two officers nodded and touched
glasses before they drank to an impossible return. Then the same who
had spoken before, remarked with a sardonic laugh, "His adversary showed
more cleverness."
"What adversary?" asked the younger, as if puzzled.
"Don't you know? They were two hussars. At each promotion they fought a
duel. Haven't you heard of the duel going on ever since 1801?"
The other had heard of the duel, of course. Now he understood the
allusion. General Baron D'Hubert would be able now to enjoy his fat
king's favour in peace.
"Much good may it do to him," mumbled the elder. "They were both brave
men. I never saw this D'Hubert--a sort of intriguing dandy, I am told.
But I can well believe what I've heard Feraud say of him--that he never
loved the Emperor."
They rose and went away.
General D'Hubert experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes
up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a
quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his
way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from
his view in the flood of moral distress. Everything he had ever been
or hoped to be would taste of bitter ignominy unless he could manage to
save General Feraud from the fate which threatened so many braves. Under
the impulse of this almost morbid need to attend to the safety of his
adversary, General D'Hubert worked so well with hands and feet (as the
French saying is), that in less than twenty-four hours he found means of
obtaining an extraordinary private audience from the Minister of Police.
General Baron D'Hubert was shown in suddenly without preliminaries. In
the dusk of the Minister's cabinet, behind the forms of writing-desk,
chairs, and tables, between two bunches of wax candles blazing in
sconces, he beheld a figure in a gorgeous coat posturing before a tall
mirror. The old conventionnel Fouche, Senator of the Empire, traitor
to every man, to every principle and motive of human conduct. Duke of
Otranto, and the wily artizan of the second Restoration, was trying
the fit of a court suit in which his young and accomplished fiancee had
declared her intention to have his portrait painted on porcelain. It was
a caprice, a charming fancy which the first Minister of Police of the
second Restoration was anxious to gratify. For that man, often compared
in wiliness of conduct to a fox, but whose ethical side could be
worthily symbolized by nothing less emphatic than a skunk, was as much
possessed by his love as General D'Hubert himself.
Startled to be discovered thus by the blunder of a servant, he met this
little vexation with the characteristic impudence which had served
his turn so well in the endless intrigues of his self-seeking career.
Without altering his attitude a hair's-breadth, one leg in a silk
stocking advanced, his head twisted over his left shoulder, he
called out calmly, "This way, General. Pray approach. Well? I am all
attention."
While General D'Hubert, ill at ease as if one of his own little
weaknesses had been exposed, presented his request as shortly as
possible, the Duke of Otranto went on feeling the fit of his collar,
settling the lapels before the glass, and buckling his back in an effort
to behold the set of the gold embroidered coat-skirts behind. His still
face, his attentive eyes, could not have expressed a more complete
interest in those matters if he had been alone.
"Exclude from the operations of the Special Court a certain Feraud,
Gabriel Florian, General of brigade of the promotion of 1814?" he
repeated, in a slightly wondering tone, and then turned away from the
glass. "Why exclude him precisely?"
"I am surprised that your Excellency, so competent in the evaluation of
men of his time, should have thought worth while to have that name put
down on the list."
"A rabid Bonapartist!"
"So is every grenadier and every trooper of the army, as your Excellency
well knows. And the individuality of General Feraud can have no more
weight than that of any casual grenadier. He is a man of no mental
grasp, of no capacity whatever. It is inconceivable that he should ever
have any influence."
"He has a well-hung tongue, though," interjected Fouche.
"Noisy, I admit, but not dangerous."
"I will not dispute with you. I know next to nothing of him. Hardly his
name, in fact."
"And yet your Excellency has the presidency of the Commission charged
by the king to point out those who were to be tried," said General
D'Hubert, with an emphasis which did not miss the minister's ear.
"Yes, General," he said, walking away into the dark part of the vast
room, and throwing himself into a deep armchair that swallowed him up,
all but the soft gleam of gold embroideries and the pallid patch of the
face--"yes, General. Take this chair there."
General D'Hubert sat down.
"Yes, General," continued the arch-master in the arts of intrigue
and betrayals, whose duplicity, as if at times intolerable to his
self-knowledge, found relief in bursts of cynical openness. "I did
hurry on the formation of the proscribing Commission, and I took its
presidency. And do you know why? Simply from fear that if I did not
take it quickly into my hands my own name would head the list of the
proscribed. Such are the times in which we live. But I am minister of
the king yet, and I ask you plainly why I should take the name of this
obscure Feraud off the list? You wonder how his name got there! Is it
possible that you should know men so little? My dear General, at the
very first sitting of the Commission names poured on us like rain off
the roof of the Tuileries. Names! We had our choice of thousands. How do
you know that the name of this Feraud, whose life or death don't matter
to France, does not keep out some other name?"
The voice out of the armchair stopped. Opposite General D'Hubert sat
still, shadowy and silent. Only his sabre clinked slightly. The voice in
the armchair began again. "And we must try to satisfy the exigencies
of the Allied Sovereigns, too. The Prince de Talleyrand told me only
yesterday that Nesselrode had informed him officially of His Majesty the
Emperor Alexander's dissatisfaction at the small number of examples the
Government of the king intends to make--especially amongst military men.
I tell you this confidentially."
"Upon my word!" broke out General D'Hubert, speaking through his teeth,
"if your Excellency deigns to favour me with any more confidential
information I don't know what I will do. It's enough to break one's
sword over one's knee, and fling the pieces. . . ."
"What government you imagined yourself to be serving?" interrupted the
minister, sharply.
After a short pause the crestfallen voice of General D'Hubert answered,
"The Government of France."
"That's paying your conscience off with mere words, General. The truth
is that you are serving a government of returned exiles, of men who have
been without country for twenty years. Of men also who have just got
over a very bad and humiliating fright. . . . Have no illusions on that
score."
The Duke of Otranto ceased. He had relieved himself, and had attained
his object of stripping some self-respect off that man who had
inconveniently discovered him posturing in a gold-embroidered court
costume before a mirror. But they were a hot-headed lot in the army; it
occurred to him that it would be inconvenient if a well-disposed general
officer, received in audience on the recommendation of one of the
Princes, were to do something rashly scandalous directly after a private
interview with the minister. In a changed tone he put a question to the
point: "Your relation--this Feraud?"
"No. No relation at all."
"Intimate friend?"
"Intimate . . . yes. There is between us an intimate connection of a
nature which makes it a point of honour with me to try . . ."
The minister rang a bell without waiting for the end of the phrase.
When the servant had gone out, after bringing in a pair of heavy silver
candelabra for the writing-desk, the Duke of Otranto rose, his breast
glistening all over with gold in the strong light, and taking a piece of
paper out of a drawer, held it in his hand ostentatiously while he said
with persuasive gentleness: "You must not speak of breaking your sword
across your knee, General. Perhaps you would never get another. The
Emperor will not return this time. . . . Diable d'homme! There was just
a moment, here in Paris, soon after Waterloo, when he frightened me.
It looked as though he were ready to begin all over again. Luckily one
never does begin all over again, really. You must not think of breaking
your sword, General."
General D'Hubert, looking on the ground, moved slightly his hand in a
hopeless gesture of renunciation. The Minister of Police turned his eyes
away from him, and scanned deliberately the paper he had been holding up
all the time.
"There are only twenty general officers selected to be made an example
of. Twenty. A round number. And let's see, Feraud. . . . Ah, he's there.
Gabriel Florian. Parfaitement. That's your man. Well, there will be only
nineteen examples made now."
General D'Hubert stood up feeling as though he had gone through an
infectious illness. "I must beg your Excellency to keep my interference
a profound secret. I attach the greatest importance to his never
learning . . ."
"Who is going to inform him, I should like to know?" said Fouche,
raising his eyes curiously to General D'Hubert's tense, set face. "Take
one of these pens, and run it through the name yourself. This is the
only list in existence. If you are careful to take up enough ink no one
will be able to tell what was the name struck out. But, par exemple, I
am not responsible for what Clarke will do with him afterwards. If he
persists in being rabid he will be ordered by the Minister of War to
reside in some provincial town under the supervision of the police."
A few days later General D'Hubert was saying to his sister, after the
first greetings had been got over: "Ah, my dear Leonie! it seemed to me
I couldn't get away from Paris quick enough."
"Effect of love," she suggested, with a malicious smile.
"And horror," added General D'Hubert, with profound seriousness. "I have
nearly died there of . . . of nausea."
His face was contracted with disgust. And as his sister looked at him
attentively he continued, "I have had to see Fouche. I have had an
audience. I have been in his cabinet. There remains with one, who had
the misfortune to breathe the air of the same room with that man, a
sense of diminished dignity, an uneasy feeling of being not so clean,
after all, as one hoped one was. . . . But you can't understand."
She nodded quickly several times. She understood very well, on the
contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly, and liked him as he was.
Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin
Fouche, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every
virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole
generation, and died obscurely as Duke of Otranto.
"My dear Armand," she said, compassionately, "what could you want from
that man?"
"Nothing less than a life," answered General D'Hubert. "And I've got
it. It had to be done. But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the
necessity to the man I had to save."
General Feraud, totally unable (as is the case with most of us) to
comprehend what was happening to him, received the Minister of War's
order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings
whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and
savage grinding of the teeth. The passing away of the state of war,
the only condition of society he had ever known, the horrible view of a
world at peace, frightened him. He went away to his little town firmly
convinced that this could not last. There he was informed of his
retirement from the army, and that his pension (calculated on the
scale of a colonel's rank) was made dependent on the correctness of his
conduct, and on the good reports of the police. No longer in the army!
He felt suddenly strange to the earth, like a disembodied spirit. It
was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted from sheer incredulity.
This could not be. He waited for thunder, earthquakes, natural
cataclysms; but nothing happened. The leaden weight of an irremediable
idleness descended upon General Feraud, who having no resources within
himself sank into a state of awe-inspiring hebetude. He haunted the
streets of the little town, gazing before him with lacklustre eyes,
disregarding the hats raised on his passage; and people, nudging each
other as he went by, whispered, "That's poor General Feraud. His heart
is broken. Behold how he loved the Emperor."
The other living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest clustered round General
Feraud with infinite respect. He, himself, imagined his soul to be
crushed by grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep,
to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed
with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui,
from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom.
His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole
saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought
of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he
experienced to express the overwhelming nature of his feelings (the most
furious swearing could do no justice to it) induced gradually a habit of
silence--a sort of death to a southern temperament.
Great, therefore, was the sensation amongst the anciens militaires
frequenting a certain little cafe; full of flies when one stuffy
afternoon "that poor General Feraud" let out suddenly a volley of
formidable curses.
He had been sitting quietly in his own privileged corner looking through
the Paris gazettes with just as much interest as a condemned man on the
eve of execution could be expected to show in the news of the day. "I'll
find out presently that I am alive yet," he declared, in a dogmatic
tone. "However, this is a private affair. An old affair of honour. Bah!
Our honour does not matter. Here we are driven off with a split ear like
a lot of cast troop horses--good only for a knacker's yard. But it
would be like striking a blow for the Emperor. . . . Messieurs, I shall
require the assistance of two of you."
Every man moved forward. General Feraud, deeply touched by this
demonstration, called with visible emotion upon the one-eyed veteran
cuirassier and the officer of the Chasseurs a Cheval who had left the
tip of his nose in Russia. He excused his choice to the others.
"A cavalry affair this--you know."
He was answered with a varied chorus of "Parfaitement, mon General
. . . . C'est juste. . . . Parbleu, c'est connu. . . ." Everybody was
satisfied. The three left the cafe together, followed by cries of "Bonne
chance."
Outside they linked arms, the general in the middle. The three rusty
cocked hats worn en bataille with a sinister forward slant barred the
narrow street nearly right across. The overheated little town of grey
stones and red tiles was drowsing away its provincial afternoon under
a blue sky. The loud blows of a cooper hooping a cask reverberated
regularly between the houses. The general dragged his left foot a little
in the shade of the walls.
"This damned winter of 1813 has got into my bones for good. Never
mind. We must take pistols, that's all. A little lumbago. We must have
pistols. He's game for my bag. My eyes are as keen as ever. You should
have seen me in Russia picking off the dodging Cossacks with a beastly
old infantry musket. I have a natural gift for firearms."
In this strain General Feraud ran on, holding up his head, with owlish
eyes and rapacious beak. A mere fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a
sabreur, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity, as, in the main, a
massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here
he had in hand a war of his own. He revived. The shadow of peace
passed away from him like the shadow of death. It was the marvellous
resurrection of the named Feraud, Gabriel Florian, engage volontaire
of 1793, General of 1814, buried without ceremony by means of a service
order signed by the War Minister of the Second Restoration.