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

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 bedroom 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