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

will understand, Monsieur, that I came out of the womb of the

grave as naked as I came from my mother’s; so that six months

afterwards, when I remembered, one fine morning, that I had been

Colonel Chabert, and when, on recovering my wits, I tried to exact

from my nurse rather more respect than she paid to any poor devil, all

my companions in the ward began to laugh. Luckily for me, the surgeon,

out of professional pride, had answered for my cure, and was naturally

interested in his patient. When I told him coherently about my former

life, this good man, named Sparchmann, signed a deposition, drawn up

in the legal form of his country, giving an account of the miraculous

way in which I had escaped from the trench dug for the dead, the day

and hour when I had been found by my benefactress and her husband, the

nature and exact spot of my injuries, adding to these documents a

description of my person.

 

“Well, monsieur, I have neither these important pieces of evidence,

nor the declaration I made before a notary at Heilsberg, with a view

to establishing my identity. From the day when I was turned out of

that town by the events of the war, I have wandered about like a

vagabond, begging my bread, treated as a madman when I have told my

story, without ever having found or earned a sou to enable me to

recover the deeds which would prove my statements, and restore me to

society. My sufferings have often kept me for six months at a time in

some little town, where every care was taken of the invalid Frenchman,

but where he was laughed at to his face as soon as he said he was

Colonel Chabert. For a long time that laughter, those doubts, used to

put me into rages which did me harm, and which even led to my being

locked up at Stuttgart as a madman. And indeed, as you may judge from

my story, there was ample reason for shutting a man up.

 

“At the end of two years’ detention, which I was compelled to submit

to, after hearing my keepers say a thousand times, ‘Here is a poor man

who thinks he is Colonel Chabert’ to people who would reply, ‘Poor

fellow!’ I became convinced of the impossibility of my own adventure.

I grew melancholy, resigned, and quiet, and gave up calling myself

Colonel Chabert, in order to get out of my prison, and see France once

more. Oh, monsieur! To see Paris again was a delirium which I–-”

 

Without finishing his sentence, Colonel Chabert fell into a deep

study, which Derville respected.

 

“One fine day,” his visitor resumed, “one spring day, they gave me the

key of the fields, as we say, and ten thalers, admitting that I talked

quite sensibly on all subjects, and no longer called myself Colonel

Chabert. On my honor, at that time, and even to this day, sometimes I

hate my name. I wish I were not myself. The sense of my rights kills

me. If my illness had but deprived me of all memory of my past life, I

could be happy. I should have entered the service again under any

name, no matter what, and should, perhaps, have been made Field-Marshal in Austria or Russia. Who knows?”

 

“Monsieur,” said the attorney, “you have upset all my ideas. I feel as

if I heard you in a dream. Pause for a moment, I beg of you.”

 

“You are the only person,” said the Colonel, with a melancholy look,

“who ever listened to me so patiently. No lawyer has been willing to

lend me ten napoleons to enable me to procure from Germany the

necessary documents to begin my lawsuit—”

 

“What lawsuit?” said the attorney, who had forgotten his client’s

painful position in listening to the narrative of his past sufferings.

 

“Why, monsieur, is not the Comtesse Ferraud my wife? She has thirty

thousand francs a year, which belong to me, and she will not give me a

son. When I tell lawyers these things—men of sense; when I propose—

I, a beggar—to bring action against a Count and Countess; when I—a

dead man—bring up as against a certificate of death a certificate of

marriage and registers of births, they show me out, either with the

air of cold politeness, which you all know how to assume to rid

yourself of a hapless wretch, or brutally, like men who think they

have to deal with a swindler or a madman—it depends on their nature.

I have been buried under the dead; but now I am buried under the

living, under papers, under facts, under the whole of society, which

wants to shove me underground again!”

 

“Pray resume your narrative,” said Derville.

 

” ‘Pray resume it!’ ” cried the hapless old man, taking the young

lawyer’s hand. “That is the first polite word I have heard since–-”

 

The Colonel wept. Gratitude choked his voice. The appealing and

unutterable eloquence that lies in the eyes, in a gesture, even in

silence, entirely convinced Derville, and touched him deeply.

 

“Listen, monsieur,” said he; “I have this evening won three hundred

francs at cards. I may very well lay out half that sum in making a man

happy. I will begin the inquiries and researches necessary to obtain

the documents of which you speak, and until they arrive I will give

you five francs a day. If you are Colonel Chabert, you will pardon the

smallness of the loan as it is coming from a young man who has his

fortune to make. Proceed.”

 

The Colonel, as he called himself, sat for a moment motionless and

bewildered; the depth of his woes had no doubt destroyed his powers of

belief. Though he was eager in pursuit of his military distinction, of

his fortune, of himself, perhaps it was in obedience to the

inexplicable feeling, the latent germ in every man’s heart, to which

we owe the experiments of alchemists, the passion for glory, the

discoveries of astronomy and of physics, everything which prompts man

to expand his being by multiplying himself through deeds or ideas. In

his mind the Ego was now but a secondary object, just as the vanity

of success or the pleasures of winning become dearer to the gambler

than the object he has at stake. The young lawyer’s words were as a

miracle to this man, for ten years repudiated by his wife, by justice,

by the whole social creation. To find in a lawyer’s office the ten

gold pieces which had so long been refused him by so many people, and

in so many ways! The colonel was like the lady who, having been ill of

a fever for fifteen years, fancied she had some fresh complaint when

she was cured. There are joys in which we have ceased to believe; they

fall on us, it is like a thunderbolt; they burn us. The poor man’s

gratitude was too great to find utterance. To superficial observers he

seemed cold, but Derville saw complete honesty under this amazement. A

swindler would have found his voice.

 

“Where was I?” said the Colonel, with the simplicity of a child or of

a soldier, for there is often something of the child in a true

soldier, and almost always something of the soldier in a child,

especially in France.

 

“At Stuttgart. You were out of prison,” said Derville.

 

“You know my wife?” asked the Colonel.

 

“Yes,” said Derville, with a bow.

 

“What is she like?”

 

“Still quite charming.”

 

The old man held up his hand, and seemed to be swallowing down some

secret anguish with the grave and solemn resignation that is

characteristic of men who have stood the ordeal of blood and fire on

the battlefield.

 

“Monsieur,” said he, with a sort of cheerfulness—for he breathed

again, the poor Colonel; he had again risen from the grave; he had

just melted a covering of snow less easily thawed than that which had

once before frozen his head; and he drew a deep breath, as if he had

just escaped from a dungeon—“Monsieur, if I had been a handsome young

fellow, none of my misfortunes would have befallen me. Women believe

in men when they flavor their speeches with the word Love. They hurry

then, they come, they go, they are everywhere at once; they intrigue,

they assert facts, they play the very devil for a man who takes their

fancy. But how could I interest a woman? I had a face like a Requiem.

I was dressed like a sans-culotte. I was more like an Esquimaux than

a Frenchman—I, who had formerly been considered one of the smartest

of fops in 1799!—I, Chabert, Count of the Empire.

 

“Well, on the very day when I was turned out into the streets like a

dog, I met the quartermaster of whom I just now spoke. This old

soldier’s name was Boutin. The poor devil and I made the queerest pair

of broken-down hacks I ever set eyes on. I met him out walking; but

though I recognized him, he could not possibly guess who I was. We

went into a tavern together. In there, when I told him my name,

Boutin’s mouth opened from ear to ear in a roar of laughter, like the

bursting of a mortar. That mirth, monsieur, was one of the keenest

pangs I have known. It told me without disguise how great were the

changes in me! I was, then, unrecognizable even to the humblest and

most grateful of my former friends!

 

“I had once saved Boutin’s life, but it was only the repayment of a

debt I owed him. I need not tell you how he did me this service; it

was at Ravenna, in Italy. The house where Boutin prevented my being

stabbed was not extremely respectable. At that time I was not a

colonel, but, like Boutin himself, a common trooper. Happily there

were certain details of this adventure which could be known only to us

two, and when I recalled them to his mind his incredulity diminished.

I then told him the story of my singular experiences. Although my eyes

and my voice, he told me, were strangely altered, although I had

neither hair, teeth, nor eyebrows, and was as colorless as an Albino,

he at last recognized his Colonel in the beggar, after a thousand

questions, which I answered triumphantly.

 

“He related his adventures; they were not less extraordinary than my

own; he had lately come back from the frontiers of China, which he had

tried to cross after escaping from Siberia. He told me of the

catastrophe of the Russian campaign, and of Napoleon’s first

abdication. That news was one of the things which caused me most

anguish!

 

“We were two curious derelicts, having been rolled over the globe as

pebbles are rolled by the ocean when storms bear them from shore to

shore. Between us we had seen Egypt, Syria, Spain, Russia, Holland,

Germany, Italy and Dalmatia, England, China, Tartary, Siberia; the

only thing wanting was that neither of us had been to America or the

Indies. Finally, Boutin, who still was more locomotive than I,

undertook to go to Paris as quickly as might be to inform my wife of

the predicament in which I was. I wrote a long letter full of details

to Madame Chabert. That, monsieur, was the fourth! If I had had any

relations, perhaps nothing of all this might have happened; but, to be

frank with you, I am but a workhouse child, a soldier, whose sole

fortune was his courage, whose sole family is mankind at large, whose

country is France, whose only protector is the Almighty.—Nay, I am

wrong! I had a father—the