Colonel Chabert - Honoré de Balzac (free books to read txt) 📗

to do

their worst. She wiped her eyes as if she had been weeping, and played

absently with the pink ribbons of her sash. Nevertheless, in spite of

her apparent assurance, she could not help shuddering slightly when

she saw before her her venerable benefactor, standing with folded

arms, his face pale, his brow stern.

 

“Madame,” he said, after gazing at her fixedly for a moment and

compelling her to blush, “Madame, I do not curse you—I scorn you. I

can now thank the chance that has divided us. I do not feel even a

desire for revenge; I no longer love you. I want nothing from you.

Live in peace on the strength of my word; it is worth more than the

scrawl of all the notaries in Paris. I will never assert my claim to

the name I perhaps have made illustrious. I am henceforth but a poor

devil named Hyacinthe, who asks no more than his share of the

sunshine.—Farewell!”

 

The Countess threw herself at his feet; she would have detained him by

taking his hands, but he pushed her away with disgust, saying:

 

“Do not touch me!”

 

The Countess’ expression when she heard her husband’s retreating steps

is quite indescribable. Then, with the deep perspicacity given only by

utter villainy, or by fierce worldly selfishness, she knew that she

might live in peace on the word and the contempt of this loyal

veteran.

 

Chabert, in fact, disappeared. The dairyman failed in business, and

became a hackney-cab driver. The Colonel, perhaps, took up some

similar industry for a time. Perhaps, like a stone flung into a chasm,

he went falling from ledge to ledge, to be lost in the mire of rags

that seethes through the streets of Paris.

 

Six months after this event, Derville, hearing no more of Colonel

Chabert or the Comtesse Ferraud, supposed that they had no doubt come

to a compromise, which the Countess, out of revenge, had had arranged

by some other lawyer. So one morning he added up the sums he had

advanced to the said Chabert with the costs, and begged the Comtesse

Ferraud to claim from M. le Comte Chabert the amount of the bill,

assuming that she would know where to find her first husband.

 

The very next day Comte Ferraud’s man of business, lately appointed

President of the County Court in a town of some importance, wrote this

distressing note to Derville:

 

“MONSIEUR,—

 

“Madame la Comtesse Ferraud desires me to inform you that your

client took complete advantage of your confidence, and that the

individual calling himself Comte Chabert has acknowledged that he

came forward under false pretences.

“Yours, etc., DELBECQ.”

 

“One comes across people who are, on my honor, too stupid by half,”

cried Derville. “They don’t deserve to be Christians! Be humane,

generous, philanthropical, and a lawyer, and you are bound to be

cheated! There is a piece of business that will cost me two thousand-franc notes!”

 

Some time after receiving this letter, Derville went to the Palais de

Justice in search of a pleader to whom he wished to speak, and who was

employed in the Police Court. As chance would have it, Derville went

into Court Number 6 at the moment when the Presiding Magistrate was

sentencing one Hyacinthe to two months’ imprisonment as a vagabond,

and subsequently to be taken to the Mendicity House of Detention, a

sentence which, by magistrates’ law, is equivalent to perpetual

imprisonment. On hearing the name of Hyacinthe, Derville looked at the

deliquent, sitting between two gendarmes on the bench for the

accused, and recognized in the condemned man his false Colonel

Chabert.

 

The old soldier was placid, motionless, almost absentminded. In spite

of his rags, in spite of the misery stamped on his countenance, it

gave evidence of noble pride. His eye had a stoical expression which

no magistrate ought to have misunderstood; but as soon as a man has

fallen into the hands of justice, he is no more than a moral entity, a

matter of law or of fact, just as to statists he has become a zero.

 

When the veteran was taken back to the lock-up, to be removed later

with the batch of vagabonds at that moment at the bar, Derville

availed himself of the privilege accorded to lawyers of going wherever

they please in the Courts, and followed him to the lock-up, where he

stood scrutinizing him for some minutes, as well as the curious crew

of beggars among whom he found himself. The passage to the lock-up at

that moment afforded one of those spectacles which, unfortunately,

neither legislators, nor philanthropists, nor painters, nor writers

come to study. Like all the laboratories of the law, this ante-room is

a dark and malodorous place; along the walls runs a wooden seat,

blackened by the constant presence there of the wretches who come to

this meeting-place of every form of social squalor, where not one of

them is missing.

 

A poet might say that the day was ashamed to light up this dreadful

sewer through which so much misery flows! There is not a spot on that

plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner

where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which

justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a

career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of

the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against

these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a

speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides

complained of by hypocritical writers who are incapable of taking a

step to prevent them—for that justification is written in that ante-room, like a preface to the dramas of the Morgue, or to those enacted

on the Place de la Greve.

 

At this moment Colonel Chabert was sitting among these men—men with

coarse faces, clothed in the horrible livery of misery, and silent at

intervals, or talking in a low tone, for three gendarmes on duty paced

to and fro, their sabres clattering on the floor.

 

“Do you recognize me?” said Derville to the old man, standing in front

of him.

 

“Yes, sir,” said Chabert, rising.

 

“If you are an honest man,” Derville went on in an undertone, “how

could you remain in my debt?”

 

The old soldier blushed as a young girl might when accused by her

mother of a clandestine love affair.

 

“What! Madame Ferraud has not paid you?” cried he in a loud voice.

 

“Paid me?” said Derville. “She wrote to me that you were a swindler.”

 

The Colonel cast up his eyes in a sublime impulse of horror and

imprecation, as if to call heaven to witness to this fresh subterfuge.

 

“Monsieur,” said he, in a voice that was calm by sheer huskiness, “get

the gendarmes to allow me to go into the lock-up, and I will sign an

order which will certainly be honored.”

 

At a word from Derville to the sergeant he was allowed to take his

client into the room, where Hyacinthe wrote a few lines, and addressed

them to the Comtesse Ferraud.

 

“Send her that,” said the soldier, “and you will be paid your costs

and the money you advanced. Believe me, monsieur, if I have not shown

you the gratitude I owe you for your kind offices, it is not the less

there,” and he laid his hand on his heart. “Yes, it is there, deep and

sincere. But what can the unfortunate do? They live, and that is all.”

 

“What!” said Derville. “Did you not stipulate for an allowance?”

 

“Do not speak of it!” cried the old man. “You cannot conceive how deep

my contempt is for the outside life to which most men cling. I was

suddenly attacked by a sickness—disgust of humanity. When I think

that Napoleon is at Saint-Helena, everything on earth is a matter of

indifference to me. I can no longer be a soldier; that is my only real

grief. After all,” he added with a gesture of childish simplicity, “it

is better to enjoy luxury of feeling than of dress. For my part, I

fear nobody’s contempt.”

 

And the Colonel sat down on his bench again.

 

Derville went away. On returning to his office, he sent Godeschal, at

that time his second clerk, to the Comtesse Ferraud, who, on reading

the note, at once paid the sum due to Comte Chabert’s lawyer.

 

In 1840, towards the end of June, Godeschal, now himself an attorney,

went to Ris with Derville, to whom he had succeeded. When they reached

the avenue leading from the highroad to Bicetre, they saw, under one

of the elm-trees by the wayside, one of those old, broken, and hoary

paupers who have earned the Marshal’s staff among beggars by living on

at Bicetre as poor women live on at la Salpetriere. This man, one of

the two thousand poor creatures who are lodged in the infirmary for

the aged, was seated on a corner-stone, and seemed to have

concentrated all his intelligence on an operation well known to these

pensioners, which consists in drying their snuffy pocket-handkerchiefs

in the sun, perhaps to save washing them. This old man had an

attractive countenance. He was dressed in a reddish cloth wrapper-coat

which the workhouse affords to its inmates, a sort of horrible

livery.

 

“I say, Derville,” said Godeschal to his traveling companion, “look at

that old fellow. Isn’t he like those grotesque carved figures we get

from Germany? And it is alive, perhaps it is happy.”

 

Derville looked at the poor man through his eyeglass, and with a

little exclamation of surprise he said:

 

“That old man, my dear fellow, is a whole poem, or, as the romantics

say, a drama.—Did you ever meet the Comtesse Ferraud?”

 

“Yes; she is a clever woman, and agreeable; but rather too pious,”

said Godeschal.

 

“That old Bicetre pauper is her lawful husband, Comte Chabert, the old

Colonel. She has had him sent here, no doubt. And if he is in this

workhouse instead of living in a mansion, it is solely because he

reminded the pretty Countess that he had taken her, like a hackney

cab, on the street. I can remember now the tiger’s glare she shot at

him at that moment.”

 

This opening having excited Godeschal’s curiosity, Derville related

the story here told.

 

Two days later, on Monday morning, as they returned to Paris, the two

friends looked again at Bicetre, and Derville proposed that they

should call on Colonel Chabert. Halfway up the avenue they found the

old man sitting on the trunk of a felled tree. With his stick in one

hand, he was amusing himself with drawing lines in the sand. On

looking at him narrowly, they perceived that he had been breakfasting

elsewhere than at Bicetre.

 

“Good-morning, Colonel Chabert,” said Derville.

 

“Not Chabert! not Chabert! My name is Hyacinthe,” replied the veteran.

“I am no longer a man, I am No. 164, Room 7,” he added, looking at

Derville with timid anxiety, the fear of an old man and a child.—“Are

you going to visit the man condemned to death?” he asked after a

moment’s silence. “He is not married! He is very lucky!”

 

“Poor fellow!” said Godeschal. “Would you like something to buy

snuff?”

 

With all the simplicity of a street Arab, the Colonel eagerly held out

his hand to the two strangers, who each gave him a twenty-franc piece;

he thanked them with a puzzled look, saying:

 

“Brave troopers!”

 

He ported arms, pretended to take aim at them, and shouted with a

smile:

 

“Fire! both arms! Vive Napoleon!” And