Title:      The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
Author:     Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff
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Date first posted:          March 2003
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
Author:     Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff





TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION

To MADAME C-------- R--------

In whom alone survives the spirit of the Sanseverina, to resist
tyranny, to unmask intrigue, to encourage ambition, this story of her
countrywoman is, in the language of her adopted country, dedicated by

C. K. S.-M.
Pisa, December, 1924.



TO THE READER

It was in the winter of 1830 and three hundred leagues from Paris that
this tale was written; thus it contains no allusion to the events of
1839.

Many years before 1830, at the time when our Armies were overrunning
Europe, chance put me in possession of a billeting order on the house
of a Canon: this was at Padua, a charming town in Italy; my stay being
prolonged, we became friends.

Passing through Padua again towards the end of 1830, I hastened to the
house of the good Canon: he himself was dead, that I knew, but I
wished to see once again the room in which we had passed so many
pleasant evenings, evenings on which I had often looked back since. I
found there the Canon's nephew and his wife who welcomed me like an
old friend. Several people came in, and we did not break up until a
very late hour; the nephew sent out to the Caffè Pedrocchi for an
excellent _zabaione_. What more than anything kept us up was the story
of the Duchessa Sanseverina, to which someone made an allusion, and
which the nephew was good enough to relate from beginning to end, in
my honour.

"In the place to which I am going," I told my friends, "I am not
likely to find evenings like this, and, to while away the long hours
of darkness, I shall make a novel out of your story."

"In that case," said the nephew, "let me give you my uncle's journal,
which, under the heading _Parma_, mentions several of the intrigues of
that court, in the days when the Duchessa's word was law there; but,
have a care! this story is anything but moral, and now that you pride
yourselves in France on your gospel purity, it may win you the
reputation of an _assassin_."

I publish this tale without any alteration from the manuscript of
1830, a course which may have two drawbacks:

The first for the reader: the characters being Italians will perhaps
interest him less, hearts in that country differing considerably from
hearts in France: the Italians are sincere, honest folk and, not
taking offence, say what is in their minds; it is only when the mood
seizes them that they shew any vanity; which then becomes passion, and
goes by the name of _puntiglio_. Lastly, poverty is not, with them, a
subject for ridicule.

The second drawback concerns the author.

I confess that I have been so bold as to leave my characters with
their natural asperities; but, on the other hand--this I proclaim
aloud--I heap the most moral censure upon many of their actions. To
what purpose should I give them the exalted morality and other graces
of French characters, who love money above all things, and sin
scarcely ever from motives of hatred or love? The Italians in this
tale are almost the opposite. Besides, it seems to me that, whenever
one takes a stride of two hundred leagues from South to North, the
change of scene that occurs is tantamount to a fresh tale. The Canon's
charming niece had known and indeed had been greatly devoted to the
Duchessa Sanseverina, and begs me to alter nothing in her adventures,
which are reprehensible.

23rd January, 1839.





THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA

VOLUME ONE

CHAPTER ONE

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan
at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the
Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries
Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of gallantry and
genius of which Italy was a witness in the space of a few months
aroused a slumbering people; only a week before the arrival of the
French, the Milanese still regarded them as a mere rabble of brigands,
accustomed invariably to flee before the troops of His Imperial and
Royal Majesty; so much at least was reported to them three times
weekly by a little news-sheet no bigger than one's hand, and printed
on soiled paper.

In the Middle Ages the Republicans of Lombardy had given proof of a
valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their city
rased to the ground by the German Emperors. Since they had become
_loyal subjects_, their great occupation was the printing of sonnets
upon handkerchiefs of rose-coloured taffeta whenever the marriage
occurred of a young lady belonging to some rich or noble family. Two
or three years after that great event in her life, the young lady in
question used to engage a devoted admirer: sometimes the name of the
_cicisbeo_ chosen by the husband's family occupied an honourable place
in the marriage contract. It was a far cry from these effeminate ways
to the profound emotions aroused by the unexpected arrival of the
French army. Presently there sprang up a new and passionate way of
life. A whole people discovered, on the 15th of May, 1796, that
everything which until then it had respected was supremely ridiculous,
if not actually hateful. The departure of the last Austrian regiment
marked the collapse of the old ideas: to risk one's life became the
fashion. People saw that in order to be really happy after centuries
of cloying sensations, it was necessary to love one's country with a
real love and to seek out heroic actions. They had been plunged in the
darkest night by the continuation of the jealous despotism of Charles
V and Philip II; they overturned these monarchs' statues and
immediately found themselves flooded with daylight. For the last
half-century, as the _Encyclopaedia_ and Voltaire gained ground in
France, the monks had been dinning into the ears of the good people of
Milan that to learn to read, or for that matter to learn anything at
all was a great waste of labour, and that by paying one's exact tithe
to one's parish priest and faithfully reporting to him all one's
little misdeeds, one was practically certain of having a good place in
Paradise. To complete the debilitation of this people once so
formidable and so rational, Austria had sold them, on easy terms, the
privilege of not having to furnish any recruits to her army.

In 1796, the Milanese army was composed of four and twenty
rapscallions dressed in scarlet, who guarded the town with the
assistance of four magnificent regiments of Hungarian Grenadiers.
Freedom of morals was extreme, but passion very rare; otherwise, apart
from the inconvenience of having to repeat everything to one's parish
priest, on pain of ruin even in this world, the good people of Milan
were still subjected to certain little monarchical interferences which
could not fail to be vexatious. For instance, the Archduke, who
resided at Milan and governed in the name of the Emperor, his
cousin, had had the lucrative idea of trading in corn. In
consequence, an order prohibiting the peasants from selling their
grain until His Highness had filled his granaries.

In May, 1796, three days after the entry of the French, a young
painter in miniature, slightly mad, named Gros, afterwards famous, who
had come with the army, overhearing in the great Caffè dei Servi
(which was then in fashion) an account of the exploits of the
Archduke, who moreover was extremely stout, picked up the list of ices
which was printed on a sheet of coarse yellow paper. On the back of
this he drew the fat Archduke; a French soldier was stabbing him with
his bayonet in the stomach, and instead of blood there gushed out an
incredible quantity of corn. What we call a lampoon or caricature was
unknown in this land of crafty 'despotism. The drawing, left by Gros
on the table of the Caffè dei Servi, seemed a miracle fallen from
heaven; it was engraved and printed during the night, and next day
twenty thousand copies of it were sold.

The same day, there were posted up notices of a forced loan of six
millions, levied to supply the needs of the French army which, having
just won six battles and conquered a score of provinces, wanted
nothing now but shoes, breeches, jackets and caps.

The mass of prosperity and pleasure which burst into Lombardy in the
wake of these French ragamuffins was so great that only the priests
and a few nobles were conscious of the burden of this levy of six
millions, shortly to be followed by a number of others. These French
soldiers laughed and sang all day long; they were all under
twenty-five years of age, and their Commander in Chief, who had
reached twenty-seven, was reckoned the oldest man in his army. This
gaiety, this youthfulness, this irresponsibility furnished a jocular
reply to the furious preachings of the monks, who, for six months, had
been announcing from the pulpit that the French were monsters,
obliged, upon pain of death, to burn down everything and to cut off
everyone's head. With this object, each of their regiments marched
with a guillotine at its head.

In the country districts one saw at the cottage doors the French
soldier engaged in dandling the housewife's baby in his arms, and
almost every evening some drummer, scraping a fiddle, would improvise
a ball. Our country dances proving a great deal too skilful and
complicated for the soldiers, who for that matter barely knew them
themselves, to be able to teach them to the women of the country, it
was the latter who shewed the young Frenchmen the _Monferrina_,
_Salterello_ and other Italian dances.

The officers had been lodged, as far as possible, with the wealthy
inhabitants; they had every need of comfort. A certain lieutenant,
for instance, named Robert, received a billeting order on the
_palazzo_ of the Marchesa del Dongo. This officer, a young conscript
not over-burdened with scruples, possessed as his whole worldly
wealth, when he entered this _palazzo_, a scudo of six francs which he
had received at Piacenza. After the crossing of the Bridge of Lodi he
had taken from a fine Austrian officer, killed by a ball, a
magnificent pair of nankeen pantaloons, quite new, and never did any
garment come more opportunely. His officer's epaulettes were of wool,
and the cloth of his tunic was stitched to the lining of the sleeves
so that its scraps might hold together; but there was something even
more distressing; the soles of his shoes were made out of pieces of
soldiers' caps, likewise picked up on the field of battle, somewhere
beyond the Bridge of Lodi. These makeshift soles were tied on over his
shoes with pieces of string which were plainly visible, so that when
the major-domo appeared at the door of Lieutenant Robert's room
bringing him an invitation to dine with the Signora Marchesa, the
officer was thrown into the utmost confusion. He and his orderly spent
the two hours that divided him from this fatal dinner in trying to
patch up the tunic a little and in dyeing black, with ink, those
wretched strings round his shoes. At last the dread moment arrived.
"Never in my life did I feel more ill at ease," Lieutenant Robert told
me; "the ladies expected that I would terrify them, and I was
trembling far more than they were. I looked down at my shoes and did
not know how to walk gracefully. The Marchesa del Dongo," he went on,
"was then in the full bloom of her beauty: you have seen her for
yourself, with those lovely eyes of an angelic sweetness, and the
dusky gold of her hair which made such a perfect frame for the oval of
that charming face. I had in my room a _Herodias_ by Leonardo da
Vinci, which might have been her portrait. Mercifully, I was so
overcome by her supernatural beauty that I forgot all about my
clothes. For the last two years I had been seeing nothing that was not
ugly and wretched, in the mountains behind Genoa: I ventured to say a
few words to her to express my delight.

"But I had too much sense to waste any time upon compliments. As I
was turning my phrases I saw, in a dining-room built entirely of
marble, a dozen flunkeys and footmen dressed in what seemed to me then
the height of magnificence. Just imagine, the rascals had not only
good shoes on their feet, but silver buckles as well. I could see them
all, out of the corner of my eye, staring stupidly at my coat and
perhaps at my shoes also, which cut me to the heart. I could have
frightened all these fellows with a word; but how was I to put them in
their place without running the risk of offending the ladies? For the
Marchesa, to fortify her own courage a little, as she has told me a
hundred times since, had sent to fetch from the convent where she was
still at school Gina del Dongo, her husband's sister, who was
afterwards that charming Contessa Pietranera: no one, in prosperity,
surpassed her in gaiety and sweetness of temper, just as no one
surpassed her in courage and serenity of soul when fortune turned
against her.

"Gina, who at that time might have been thirteen but looked more like
eighteen, a lively, downright girl, as you know, was in such fear of
bursting out laughing at the sight of my costume that she dared not
eat; the Marchesa, on the other hand, loaded me with constrained
civilities; she could see quite well the movements of impatience in my
eyes. In a word, I cut a sorry figure, I chewed the bread of scorn, a
thing which is said to be impossible for a Frenchman. At length, a
heaven-sent idea shone in my mind: I set to work to tell the ladies of
my poverty and of what we had suffered for the last two years in the
mountains behind Genoa where we were kept by idiotic old Generals.
There, I told them, we were paid in _assignats_ which were not legal
tender in the country, and given three ounces of bread daily. I had
not been speaking for two minutes before there were tears in the good
Marchesa's eyes, and Gina had grown serious.

"'What, Lieutenant,' she broke in, 'three ounces of bread!'

"'Yes, Signorina; but to make up for that the issue ran short three
days in the week, and as the peasants on whom we were billeted were
even worse off than ourselves, we used to hand on some of our bread to
them.'

"On leaving the table, I offered the Marchesa my arm as far as the
door of the drawing-room, then hurried back and gave the servant who
had waited upon me at dinner that solitary scudo of six francs upon
the spending of which I had built so many castles in the air.

"A week later," Robert went on, "when it was satisfactorily
established that the French were not guillotining anyone, the
Marchese del Dongo returned from his castle of Grianta on the Lake of
Como, to which he had gallantly retired on the approach of the army,
abandoning to the fortunes of war his young and beautiful wife and
his sister. The hatred that this Marchese felt for us was equal to his
fear, that is to say immeasurable: his fat face, pale and pious, was
an amusing spectacle when he was being polite to me. On the day after
his return to Milan, I received three ells of cloth and two hundred
francs out of the levy of six millions; I renewed my wardrobe, and
became cavalier to the ladies, for the season of balls was beginning."

Lieutenant Robert's story was more or less that of all the French
troops; instead of laughing at the wretched plight of these poor
soldiers, people were sorry for them and came to love them.

This period of unlooked-for happiness and wild excitement lasted but
two short years; the frenzy had been so excessive and so general
that it would be impossible for me to give any idea of it, were it not
for this historical and profound reflexion: these people had been
living in a state of boredom for the last hundred years.

The thirst for pleasure natural in southern countries had prevailed in
former times at the court of the Visconti and Sforza, those famous
Dukes of Milan. But from the year 1524, when the Spaniards conquered
the Milanese, and conquered them as taciturn, suspicious, arrogant
masters, always in dread of revolt, gaiety had fled. The subject
race, adopting the manners of their masters, thought more of avenging
the least insult by a dagger-blow than of enjoying the fleeting hour.

This frenzied joy, this gaiety, this thirst for pleasure, this
tendency to forget every sad or even reasonable feeling, were carried
to such a pitch, between the 15th of May, 1796, when the French
entered Milan, and April, 1799, when they were driven out again after
the battle of Cassano, that instances have been cited of old
millionaire merchants, old money-lenders, old scriveners who, during
this interval, quite forgot to pull long faces and to amass money.

At the most it would have been possible to point to a few families
belonging to the higher ranks of the nobility, who had retired to
their palaces in the country, as though in a sullen revolt against the
prevailing high spirits and the expansion of every heart. It is true
that these noble and wealthy families had been given a distressing
prominence in the allocation of the forced loans exacted for the
French army.

The Marchese del Dongo, irritated by the spectacle of so much gaiety,
had been one of the first to return to his magnificent castle of
Grianta, on the farther side of Como, whither his ladies took with
them Lieutenant Robert. This castle, standing in a position which is
perhaps unique in the world, on a plateau one hundred and fifty feet
above that sublime lake, a great part of which it commands, had been
originally a fortress. The del Dongo family had constructed it in the
fifteenth century, as was everywhere attested by marble tablets
charged with their arms; one could still see the drawbridges and deep
moats, though the latter, it must be admitted, had been drained of
their water; but with its walls eighty feet in height and six in
thickness, this castle was safe from assault, and it was for this
reason that it was dear to the timorous Marchese. Surrounded by some
twenty-five or thirty retainers whom he supposed to be devoted to his
person, presumably because he never opened his mouth except to curse
them, he was less tormented by fear than at Milan.

This fear was not altogether groundless: he was in most active
correspondence with a spy posted by Austria on the Swiss frontier
three leagues from Grianta, to contrive the escape of the prisoners
taken on the field of battle; conduct which might have been viewed in
a serious light by the French Generals.

The Marchese had left his young wife at Milan; she looked after the
affairs of the family there, and was responsible for providing the
sums levied on the _casa del Dongo_ (as they say in Italy) ; she
sought to have these reduced, which obliged her to visit those of the
nobility who had accepted public office, and even some highly
influential persons who were not of noble birth. A great event now
occurred in this family. The Marchese had arranged the marriage of his
young sister Gina with a personage of great wealth and the very
highest birth; but he powdered his hair; in virtue of which, Ghia
received him with shouts of laughter, and presently took the rash step
of marrying the Conte Pietranera. He was, it is true, a very fine
gentleman, of the most personable appearance, but ruined for
generations past in estate, and to complete the disgrace of the match,
a fervent supporter of the new ideas. Pietranera was a sub-lieutenant
in the Italian Legion; this was the last straw for the Marchese.

After these two years of folly and happiness, the Directory in Paris,
giving itself the ate of a sovereign firmly enthroned, began to shew
a mortal hatred of everything that was not commonplace. The
incompetent Generals whom it imposed on the Army of Italy lost a
succession of battles on those same plains of Verona, which had
witnessed two years before the prodigies of Arcole and Lonato. The
Austrians again drew near to Milan; Lieutenant Robert, who had been
promoted to the command of a battalion and had been wounded at the
battle of Cassano, came to lodge for the last time in the house of his
friend the Marchesa del Dongo. Their parting was a sad one; Robert set
forth with Conte Pietranera, who followed the French in their
retirement on Novi. The young Contessa, to whom her brother refused to
pay her marriage portion, followed the army, riding in a cart.

Then began that period of reaction and a return to the old ideas,
which the Milanese call _i tredici mesi_ (the thirteen months),
because as it turned out their destiny willed that this return to
stupidity should endure for thirteen months only, until Marengo.
Everyone who was old, bigoted, morose, reappeared at the head of
affairs, and resumed the leadership of society; presently the people
who had remained faithful to the sound doctrines published a report
in the villages that Napoleon had been hanged by the Mamelukes in
Egypt, as he so richly deserved.

Among these men who had retired to sulk on their estates and came back
now athirst for vengeance, the Marchese del Dongo distinguished
himself by his rabidity; the extravagance of his sentiments carried
him naturally to the head of his party. These gentlemen, quite worthy
people when they were not in a state of panic, but who were always
trembling, succeeded in getting round the Austrian General: a good
enough man at heart, he let himself be persuaded that severity was the
best policy, and ordered the arrest of one hundred and fifty patriots:
quite the best man to be found in Italy at the time.

They were speedily deported to the Bocche di Cattaro, and, flung into
subterranean caves, the moisture and above all the want of bread did
prompt justice to each and all of these rascals.

The Marchese del Dongo had an exalted position, and, as he combined
with a host of other fine qualities a sordid avarice, he would boast
publicly that he never sent a scudo to his sister, the Contessa
Pietranera: still madly in love, she refused to leave her husband,
and was starving by his side in France. The good Marchesa was in
despair; finally she managed to abstract a few small diamonds from
her jewel case, which her husband took from her every evening to stow
away under his bed, in an iron coffer: the Marchesa had brought him a
dowry of 800,000 francs, and received 80 francs monthly for her
personal expenses. During the thirteen months in which the French were
absent from Milan, this most timid of women found various pretexts and
never went out of mourning.

We must confess that, following the example of many grave authors, we
have begun the history of our hero a year before his birth. This
essential personage is none other than Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino
del Dongo, as the style is at Milan. [Footnote: By the local custom,
borrowed from Germany, this title is given to every son of a Marchese;
_Contino_ to the son of a Conte, _Contessina_ to the daughter of a
Conte, etc.]


He had taken the trouble to be born just when the French were driven
out, and found himself, by the accident of birth, the second son of
that Marchese del Dongo who was so great a gentleman, and with whose
fat, pasty face, false smile and unbounded hatred for the new ideas
the reader is already acquainted. The whole of the family fortune was
already settled upon the elder son, Ascanio del Dongo, the worthy
image of his father. He was eight years old and Fabrizio two when all
of a sudden that General Bonaparte, whom everyone of good family
understood to have been hanged long ago, came down from the Mont
Saint-Bernard. He entered Milan: that moment is still unique in
history; imagine a whole populace madly in love. A few days later,
Napoleon won the battle of Marengo. The rest needs no telling. The
frenzy of the Milanese reached its climax; but this time it was
mingled with ideas of vengeance: these good people had been taught to
hate. Presently they saw arrive in their midst all that remained of
the patriots deported to the Bocche di Cattaro; their return was
celebrated with a national festa. Their pale faces, their great
startled eyes, their shrunken limbs were in strange contrast to the
joy that broke out on every side. Their arrival was the signal for
departure for the families most deeply compromised. The Marchese del
Dongo was one of the first to flee to his castle of Grianta. The heads
of the great families were filled with hatred and fear; but their
wives, their daughters, remembered the joys of the former French
occupation, and thought with regret of Milan and those gay balls,
which, immediately after Marengo, were organised afresh at the _casa
Tanzi_. A few days after the victory, the French General responsible
for maintaining order in Lombardy discovered that all the farmers on
the noblemen's estates, all the old wives in the villages, so far from
still thinking of this astonishing victory at Marengo, which had
altered the destinies of Italy and recaptured thirteen fortified
positions in a single day, had their minds occupied only by a prophecy
of San Giovila, the principal Patron Saint of Brescia. According to
this inspired utterance, the prosperity of France and of Napoleon was
to cease just thirteen weeks after Marengo. What does to some extent
excuse the Marchese del Dongo and all the nobles sulking on their
estates is that literally and without any affectation they believed in
the prophecy. Not one of these gentlemen had read as many as four
volumes in his life; quite openly they were making their preparations
to return to Milan at the end of the thirteen weeks; but time, as it
went on, recorded fresh successes for the cause of France. Returning
to Paris, Napoleon, by wise decrees, saved the country from revolution
at home as he had saved it from its foreign enemies at Marengo. Then
the Lombard nobles, in the safe shelter of their castles, discovered
that at first they had misinterpreted the prophecy of the holy
patron of Brescia; it was a question not of thirteen weeks, but of
thirteen months. The thirteen months went by, and the prosperity of
France seemed to increase daily.

We pass lightly over ten years of progress and happiness, from 1800 to
1810. Fabrizio spent the first part of this decade at the castle of
Grianta, giving and receiving an abundance of fisticuffs among the
little _contadini_ of the village, and learning nothing, not even how
to read. Later on, he was sent to the Jesuit College at Milan. The
Marchese, his father, insisted on his being shewn the Latin tongue,
not on any account in the works of those ancient writers who are
always talking about Republics, but in a magnificent volume adorned
with more than a hundred engravings, a masterpiece of
seventeenth-century art; this was the Lathi genealogy of the Valserra,
Marchesi del Dongo, published in 1650 by Fabrizio del Dongo,
Archbishop of Parma. The fortunes of the Valserra being pre-eminently
military, the engravings represented any number of battles, and
everywhere one saw some hero of the name dealing mighty blows with his
sword. This book greatly delighted the young Fabrizio. His mother,
who adored him, obtained permission, from time to time, to pay him a
visit at Milan; but as her husband never offered her any money for
these journeys, it was her sister-in-law, the charming Contessa
Pietranera, who lent her what she required. After the return of the
French, the Contessa had become one of the most brilliant ladies at
the court of Prince Eugène, the Viceroy of Italy.

When Fabrizio had made his First Communion, she obtained leave from
the Marchese, still in voluntary exile, to invite him out, now and
again, from his college. She found him unusual, thoughtful, very
serious, but a nice-looking boy and not at all out of place in the
drawing-room of a lady of fashion; otherwise, as ignorant as one could
wish, and barely able to write. The Contessa, who carried her
impulsive character into everything, promised her protection to the
head of the establishment provided that her nephew Fabrizio made
astounding progress and carried off a number of prizes at the end of
the year. So that he should be in a position to deserve them, she used
to send for bun every Saturday evening, and often did not restore him
to his masters until the following Wednesday or Thursday. The Jesuits,
although tenderly cherished by the Prince Viceroy, were expelled
from Italy by the laws of the Kingdom, and the Superior of the
College, an able man, was conscious of all that might be made out of
his relations with a woman all-powerful at court. He never thought of
complaining of the absences of Fabrizio, who, more ignorant than ever,
at the end of the year was awarded five first prizes. This being so,
the Contessa, escorted by her husband, now the General commanding one
of the Divisions of the Guard, and by five or six of the most
important personages at the viceregal court, came to attend the
prize-giving at the Jesuit College. The Superior was complimented by
his chiefs.

The Contessa took her nephew with her to all those brilliant
festivities which marked the too brief reign of the sociable Prince
Eugène. She had on her own authority created him an officer of
hussars, and Fabrizio, now twelve years old, wore that uniform. One
day the Contessa, enchanted by his handsome figure, besought the
Prince to give him a post as page, a request which implied that the
del Dongo family was coming round. Next day she had need of all her
credit to secure the Viceroy's kind consent not to remember this
request, which lacked only the consent of the prospective page's
father, and this consent would have been emphatically refused. After
this act of folly, which made the sullen Marchese shudder, he found
an excuse to recall young Fabrizio to Grianta. The Contessa had a
supreme contempt for her brother, she regarded him as a melancholy
fool, and one who would be troublesome if ever it lay in his power.
But she was madly fond of Fabrizio, and, after ten years of silence,
wrote to the Marchese reclaiming her nephew; her letter was left
unanswered.

On his return to this formidable palace, built by the most bellicose
of his ancestors, Fabrizio knew nothing in the world except how to
drill and how to sit on a horse. Conte Pietranera, as fond of the boy
as was his wife, used often to put him on a horse and take him with
him on parade.

On reaching the castle of Grianta, Fabrizio, his eyes still red with
the tears that he had shed on leaving his aunt's fine rooms, found
only the passionate caresses of his mother and sisters. The Marchese
was closeted in his study with his elder son, the Marchesino Ascanio;
there they composed letters in cipher which had the honour to be
forwarded to Vienna; father and son appeared in public only at
meal-times. The Marchese used ostentatiously to repeat that he was
teaching his natural successor to keep, by double entry, the accounts
of the produce of each of his estates. As a matter of fact, the
Marchese was too jealous of his own power ever to speak of these
matters to a son, the necessary inheritor of all these entailed
properties. He employed him to cipher despatches of fifteen or twenty
pages which two or throe times weekly he had conveyed into
Switzerland, where they were put on the road for Vienna. The Marchese
claimed to inform his rightful Sovereign of the internal condition of
the Kingdom of Italy, of which he himself knew nothing, and his
letters were invariably most successful, for the following reason: the
Marchese would have a count taken on the high road, by some trusted
agent, of the number of men in a certain French or Italian regiment
that was changing its station, and in reporting the fact to the court
of Vienna would take care to reduce by at least a quarter the number
of the troops on the march. These letters, in other respects absurd,
had the merit of contradicting others of greater accuracy, and gave
pleasure. And so, a short time before Fabrizio's arrival at the
castle, the Marchese had received the star of a famous order: it was
the fifth to adorn his Chamberlain's coat. As a matter of fact, he
suffered from the chagrin of not daring to sport this garment outside
his study; but he never allowed himself to dictate a despatch without
first putting on the gold-laced coat, studded with all his orders. He
would have felt himself to be wanting in respect had he acted
otherwise.

The Marchesa was amazed by her son's graces. But she had kept up the
habit of writing two or three times every year to General Comte
d'A----, which was the title now borne by Lieutenant Robert. The
Marchesa had a horror of lying to the people to whom she was attached;
she examined her son and was appalled by his ignorance.

"If he appears to me to have learned little," she said to herself, "to
me who know nothing, Robert, who is so clever, would find that his
education had been entirely neglected; and in these days one must have
merit." Another peculiarity, which astonished her almost as much, was
that Fabrizio had taken seriously all the religious teaching that had
been instilled into him by the Jesuits. Although very pious herself,
the fanaticism of this child made her shudder; "If the Marchese has
the sense to discover this way of influencing him, he will take my
son's affection from me." She wept copiously, and her passion for
Fabrizio was thereby increased.

Life in this castle, peopled by thirty or forty servants, was
extremely dull; accordingly Fabrizio spent all his days in pursuit of
game or exploring the lake in a boat. Soon he was on intimate terms
with the coachmen and grooms; these were all hot supporters of the
French, and laughed openly at the pious valets, attached to the person
of the Marchese or to that of his elder son. The great theme for wit
at the expense of these solemn personages was that, in imitation of
their masters, they powdered their heads.




CHAPTER TWO

_... Alors que Vesper vient embrunir nos yeux, Tout épris d'avenir, je
contemple les deux, En qui Dieu nous escrit, par notes non obscures,
Les sorts et les destins de toutes créatures. Car lui, du fond des
deux regardant un humain, Parfois mû de pitié, lui montre le chemin;
Par les astres du ciel qui sont ses caractères, Les choses nous prédit
et bonnes et contraires; Mais les hommes chargés de terre et de
trépas, Méprisent tel écrit, et ne le lisent pas_.

RONSARD.

The Marchese professed a vigorous hatred of enlightenment: "It is
ideas," he used to say, "that have ruined Italy"; he did not know
quite how to reconcile this holy horror of instruction with his desire
to see his son Fabrizio perfect the education so brilliantly begun
with the Jesuits. In order to incur the least possible risk, he
charged the good Priore Blanès, parish priest of Grianta, with the
task of continuing Fabrizio's Latin studies. For this it was necessary
that the priest should himself know that language; whereas it was to
him an object of scorn; his knowledge in the matter being confined to
the recitation, by heart, of the prayers in his missal, the meaning of
which he could interpret more or less to his flock. But this priest
was nevertheless highly respected and indeed feared throughout the
district; he had always said that it was by no means in thirteen
weeks, nor even in thirteen months that they would see the fulfilment
of the famous prophecy of San Giovila, the Patron Saint of Brescia. He
added, when he was speaking to friends whom he could trust, that this
number _thirteen_ was to be interpreted in a fashion which would
astonish many people, if it were permitted to say all that one knew
(1813).

The fact was that the Priore Blanès, a man whose honesty and virtue
were primitive, and a man of parts as well, spent all his nights up in
his belfry; he was mad on astrology. After using up all his days in
calculating the conjunctions and positions of the stars, he would
devote the greater part of his nights to following their course in the
sky. Such was his poverty, he had no other instrument than a long
telescope with pasteboard tubes. One may imagine the contempt that
was felt for the study of languages by a man who spent his time
discovering the precise dates of the fall of empires and the
revolutions that change the face of the world. "What more do I know
about a horse," he asked Fabrizio, "when I am told that in Latin it is
called equus?"

The _contadini_ looked upon Priore Blanès with awe as a great
magician: for his part, by dint of the fear that his nightly stations
in the belfry inspired, he restrained them from stealing. His clerical
brethren in the surrounding parishes, intensely jealous of his
influence, detested him; the Marchese del Dongo merely despised him,
because he reasoned too much for a man of such humble station.
Fabrizio adored him: to gratify him he sometimes spent whole evenings
in doing enormous sums of addition or multiplication. Then he would go
up to the belfry: this was a great favour and one that Priore Blanès
had never granted to anyone; but he liked the boy for his simplicity.
"If you do not turn out a hypocrite," he would say to him, "you will
perhaps be a man."

Two or three times in a year, Fabrizio, intrepid and passionate in
his pleasures, came within an inch of drowning himself in the lake.
He was the leader of all the great expeditions made by the young
_contadini_ of Grianta and Cadenabbia. These boys had procured a
number of little keys, and on very dark nights would try to open the
padlocks of the chains that fastened the boats to some big stone or to
a tree growing by the water's edge. It should be explained that on the
Lake of Como the fishermen in the pursuit of their calling put out
night-lines at a great distance from the shore. The upper end of the
line is attached to a plank kept afloat by a cork keel, and a supple
hazel twig, fastened to this plank, supports a little bell which rings
whenever a fish, caught on the line, gives a tug to the float.

The great object of these nocturnal expeditions, of which Fabrizio was
commander in chief, was to go out and visit the night-lines before the
fishermen had heard the warning note of the little bells. They used to
choose stormy weather, and for these hazardous exploits would embark
in the early morning, an hour before dawn. As they climbed into the
boat, these boys imagined themselves to be plunging into the greatest
dangers; this was the finer aspect of their behaviour; and, following
the example of their fathers, would devoutly repeat a _Hail, Mary_.
Now it frequently happened that at the moment of starting, and
immediately after the _Hail, Mary_, Fabrizio was struck by a
foreboding. This was the fruit which he had gathered from the
astronomical studies of his friend Priore Blanès, in whose predictions
he had no faith whatsoever. According to his youthful imagination,
this foreboding announced to him infallibly the success or failure of
the expedition; and, as he had a stronger will than any of his
companions, in course of time the whole band had so formed the habit
of having forebodings that if, at the moment of embarking, one of them
caught sight of a priest on the shore, or if someone saw a crow fly
past on his left, they would hasten to replace the padlock on the
chain of the boat, and each would go off to his bed. Thus Priore
Blanès had not imparted his somewhat difficult science to Fabrizio;
but, unconsciously, had infected him with an unbounded confidence in
the signs by which the future can be foretold.

The Marchese felt that any accident to his ciphered correspondence
might put him at the mercy of his sister; and so every year, at the
feast of Sant'Angela, which was Contessa Pietranera's name-day,
Fabrizio was given leave to go and spend a week at Milan. He lived
through the year looking hopefully forward or sadly back to this week.
On this great occasion, to carry out this politic mission, the
Marchese handed over to his son four scudi, and, in accordance with
his custom, gave nothing to his wife, who took the boy. But one of the
cooks, six lackeys and a coachman with a pair of horses started for
Como the day before, and every day at Milan the Marchesa found a
carriage at her disposal and a dinner of twelve covers.

The sullen sort of life that was led by the Marchese del Dongo was
certainly by no means entertaining, but it had this advantage that it
permanently enriched the families who were kind enough to sacrifice
themselves to it. The Marchese, who had an income of more than two
hundred thousand lire, did not spend a quarter of that sum; he was
living on hope. Throughout the thirteen years from 1800 to 1813, he
constantly and firmly believed that Napoleon would be overthrown
within six months. One may judge of his rapture when, at the
beginning of 1813, he learned of the disasters of the Beresima! The
taking of Paris and the fall of Napoleon almost made him lose his
head; he then allowed himself to make the most outrageous remarks to
his wife and sister. Finally, after fourteen years of waiting, he had
that unspeakable joy of seeing the Austrain troops re-enter Milan. In
obedience to orders issued from Vienna, the Austrian General received
the Marchese del Dongo with a consideration akin to respect; they
hastened to offer him one of the highest posts in the government; and
he accepted it as the payment of a debt. His elder son obtained a
lieutenancy in one of the smartest regiments of the Monarchy, but the
younger repeatedly declined to accept a cadetship which was offered
him. This triumph, in which the Marchese exulted with a rare
insolence, lasted but a few months, and was followed by a humiliating
reverse. Never had he had any talent for business, and fourteen years
spent in the country among his footmen, his lawyer and his doctor,
added to the crustiness of old age which had overtaken him, had left
him totally incapable of conducting business in any form. Now it is
not possible, in an Austrian country, to keep an important place
without having the kind of talent that is required by the slow and
complicated, but highly reasonable administration of that venerable
Monarchy. The blunders made by the Marchese del Dongo scandalised the
staff of his office, and even obstructed the course of public
business. His ultra-monarchist utterances irritated the populace which
the authorities sought to lull into a heedless slumber. One fine day
he learned that His Majesty had been graciously pleased to accept the
resignation which he had submitted of his post in the administration,
and at the same time conferred on him the place of _Second Grand
Major-domo Major_ of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom. The Marchese was
furious at the atrocious injustice of which he had been made a victim;
he printed an open letter to a friend, he who so inveighed against the
liberty of the press. Finally, he wrote to the Emperor that his
Ministers were playing him false, and were no better than Jacobins.
These things accomplished, he went sadly back to his castle of
Grianta. He had one consolation. After the fall of Napoleon, certain
powerful personages at Milan planned an assault in the streets on
Conte Prina, a former Minister of the King of Italy, and a man of the
highest merit. Conte Pietranera risked his own life to save that of
the Minister, who was killed by blows from umbrellas after five hours
of agony. A priest, the Marchese del Bongo's confessor, could have
saved Prina by opening the wicket of the church of San Giovanni, in
front of which the unfortunate Minister was dragged, and indeed left
for a moment in the gutter, in the middle of the street; but he
refused with derision to open his wicket, and, six months afterwards,
the Marchese was happily able to secure for him a fine advancement.

He execrated Conte Pietranera, his brother-in-law, who, not having an
income of 50 louis, had the audacity to be quite content, made a point
of showing himself loyal to what he had loved all his life, and had
the insolence to preach that spirit of justice without regard for
persons, which the Marchese called an infamous piece of Jacobinism.
The Conte had refused to take service in Austria; this refusal was
remembered against him, and, a few months after the death of Prina, the
same persons who had hired the assassins contrived that General
Pietranera should be flung into prison. Whereupon the Contessa, his
wife, procured a passport and sent for posthorses to go to Vienna to
tell the Emperor the truth. Prina's assassins took fright, and one of
them, a cousin of Signora Pietranera, came to her at midnight, an hour
before she was to start for Vienna, with the order for her husband's
release. Next day, the Austrian General sent for Conte Pietranera,
received him with every possible mark of distinction, and assured him
that his pension as a retired officer would be issued to him without
delay and on the most liberal scale. The gallant General Bubna, a man
of sound judgement and warm heart, seemed quite ashamed of the
assassination of Prina and the Conte's imprisonment.

After this brief storm, allayed by the Contessa's firmness of
character, the couple lived, for better or worse, on the retired pay
for which, thanks to General Bubna's recommendation, they were not
long kept waiting.

Fortunately, it so happened that, for the last five or six years, the
Contessa had been on the most friendly terms with a very rich young
man, who was also an intimate friend of the Conte, and never failed to
place at their disposal the finest team of English horses to be seen
in Milan at the time, his box in the theatre _alla Scala_ and his
villa in the country. But the Conte had a sense of his own valour, he
was full of generous impulses, he was easily carried away, and at such
times allowed himself to make imprudent speeches. One day when he was
out shooting with some young men, one of them, who had served under
other flags than his, began to belittle the courage of the soldiers of
the Cisalpine Republic. The Conte struck him, a fight at once
followed, and the Conte, who was without support among all these young
men, was killed. This species of duel gave rise to a great deal of
talk, and the persons who had been engaged in it took the precaution
of going for a tour in Switzerland.

That absurd form of courage which is called resignation, the courage
of a fool who allows himself to be hanged without a word of protest,
was not at all in keeping with the Contessa's character. Furious at
the death of her husband, she would have liked Limercati, the rich
young man, her intimate friend, to be seized also by the desire to
travel in Switzerland, and there to shoot or otherwise assault the
murderer of Conte Pietranera.

Limercati thought this plan the last word in absurdity, and the
Contessa discovered that in herself contempt for him had killed her
affection. She multiplied her attentions to Limercati; she sought to
rekindle his love, and then to leave him stranded and so make him
desperate. To render this plan of vengeance intelligible to French
readers, I should explain that at Milan, in a land widely remote from
our own, people are still made desperate by love. The Contessa, who,
in her widow's weeds, easily eclipsed any of her rivals, flirted with
all the young men of rank and fashion, and one of these, Conte N----,
who, from the first, had said that he felt Limercati's good qualities
to be rather heavy, rather starched for so spirited a woman, fell
madly in love with her. She wrote to Limercati:

"Will you for once act like a man of spirit? Please to consider that
you have never known me.

"I am, with a trace of contempt perhaps, your most humble servant,

"GiNA PIETRANERA."

After reading this missive, Limercati set off for one of his country
seats, his love rose to a climax, he became quite mad and spoke of
blowing out his brains, an unheard-of thing in countries where hell is
believed in. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival in the country,
he had written to the Contessa offering her his hand and his rent-roll
of 200,000 francs. She sent him back his letter, with its seal
unbroken, by Conte N----'s groom. Whereupon Limercati spent three
years on his estates, returning every other month to Milan, but
without ever having the courage to remain there, and boring all his
friends with his passionate love for the Contessa and his detailed
accounts of the favours she had formerly bestowed otì him. At first,
he used to add that with Conte N---- she was ruining herself, and that
such a connexion was degrading to her.

The fact of the matter was that the Contessa had no sort of love for
Conte N----, and she told him as much when she had made quite sure of
Limercati's despair. The Conte, who was no novice, besought her upon
no account to divulge the sad truth which she had confided to him. "If
you will be so extremely indulgent," he added, "as to continue to
receive me with all the outward distinctions accorded to a reigning
lover, I may perhaps be able to find a suitable position."

After this heroic declaration the Contessa declined to avail herself
any longer either of Conte N----'s horses or of his box. But for the
last fifteen years she had been accustomed to the most fashionable
style of living; she had now to solve that difficult, or rather
impossible, problem: how to live in Milan on a pension of 1,500
francs. She left her _palazzo_, took a pair of rooms on a fifth floor,
dismissed all her servants, including even her own maid whose place
she filled with a poor old woman to do the housework. This sacrifice
was as a matter of fact less heroic and less painful than it appears
to us; at Milan poverty is not a thing to laugh at, and therefore does
not present itself to trembling souls as the worst of evils. After
some months of this noble poverty, besieged by incessant letters
from Limercati, and indeed from Conte N----, who also wished to marry
her, it came to pass that the Marchese del Dongo, miserly as a rule to
the last degree, bethought himself that his enemies might find a cause
for triumph in his sister's plight. What! A del Dongo reduced to
living upon the pension which the court of Vienna, of which he had so
many grounds for complaint, grants to the widows of its Generals!

He wrote to inform her that an apartment and an allowance worthy of
his sister awaited her at the castle of Grianta.

The Contessa's volatile mind embraced with enthusiasm the idea of this
new mode of life; it was twenty years since she had lived in that
venerable castle that rose majestically from among its old chestnuts
planted in the days of the Sforza. "There," she told herself, "I
shall find repose, and, at my age, is not that in itself happiness?"
(Having reached one-and-thirty, she imagined that the time had come
for her to retire.) "On that sublime lake by which I was born, there
awaits me at last a happy and peaceful existence."

I cannot say whether she was mistaken, but one thing certain is that
this passionate soul, which had just refused so lightly the offer of
two vast fortunes, brought happiness to the castle of Grianta. Her two
nieces were wild with joy. "You have renewed the dear days of my
youth," the Marchesa told her, as she took her in her arms; "before
you came, I was a hundred." The Contessa set out to revisit, with
Fabrizio, all those enchanting spots in the neighbourhood of Grianta,
which travellers have made so famous: the Villa Melzi on the other
shore of the lake, opposite the castle, and commanding a fine view of
it; higher up, the sacred wood of the Sfrondata, and the bold
promontory which divides the two arms of the lake, that of Como, so
voluptuous, and the other, which runs towards Lecco, grimly severe:
sublime and charming views which the most famous site in the world,
the Bay of Naples, may equal, but does not surpass. It was with
ecstasy that the Contessa recaptured the memories of her earliest
childhood and compared them with her present sensations. "The Lake
of Como," she said to herself, "is not surrounded, like the Lake of
Geneva, by wide tracts of land enclosed and cultivated according to
the most approved methods, which suggest money and speculation. Here,
on every side, I see hills of irregular height covered with clumps of
trees that have grown there at random, which the hand of man has never
yet spoiled and forced to _yield a return_. Standing among these
admirably shaped hills which run down to the lake at such curious
angles, I can preserve all the illusions of Tasso's and Ariosto's
descriptions. All is noble and tender, everything speaks of love,
nothing recalls the ugliness of civilisation. The villages halfway
up their sides are hidden in tall trees, and above the tree-tops rises
the charming architecture of their picturesque belfries. If some
little field fifty yards across comes here and there to interrupt the
clumps of chestnuts and wild cherries, the satisfied eye sees growing
on it plants more vigorous and happier than elsewhere. Beyond these
hills, the crests of which offer one hermitages in all of which one
would like to dwell, the astonished eye perceives the peaks of the
Alps, always covered in snow, and their stern austerity recalls to one
so much of the sorrows of life as is necessary to enhance one's
immediate pleasure. The imagination is touched by the distant sound of
the bell of some little village hidden among the trees: these sounds,
borne across the waters which soften their tone, assume a tinge of
gentle melancholy and resignation, and seem to be saying to man: 'Life
is fleeting: do not therefore show yourself so obdurate towards the
happiness that is offered you, make haste to enjoy it.' " The language
of these enchanting spots, which have not their like in the world,
restored to the Contessa the heart of a girl of sixteen. She could not
conceive how she could have spent all these years without revisiting
the lake. "Is it then to the threshold of old age," she asked herself,
"that our happiness takes flight?" She bought a boat which Fabrizio,
the Marchesa and she decorated with their own hands, having no money
to spend on anything, in the midst of this most luxurious
establishment; since his disgrace the Marchese del Dongo had doubled
his aristocratic state. For example, in order to reclaim ten yards of
land from the lake, near the famous plane avenue, in the direction of
Cadenabbia, he had an embankment built the estimate for which ran to
80,000 francs. At the end of this embankment there rose, from the
plans of the famous Marchese Gagnola, a chapel built entirely of huge
blocks of granite, and in this chapel Marchesi, the sculptor then in
fashion at Milan, built him a tomb on which a number of bas-reliefs
were intended to represent the gallant deeds of his ancestors.

Fabrizio's elder brother, the Marchesino Ascanio, sought to join the
ladies in their excursions; but his aunt flung water over his powdered
hair, and found some fresh dart every day with which to puncture his
solemnity. At length he delivered from the sight of his fat, pasty
face the merry troop who did not venture to laugh in his presence.
They supposed him to be the spy of the Marchese, his father, and care
had to be taken in handling that stern despot, always in a furious
temper since his enforced retirement.

Ascanio swore to be avenged on Fabrizio.

There was a storm in which they were all in danger; although they
were infinitely short of money, they paid the two boatmen generously
not to say anything to the Marchese, who already was showing great ill
humour at their taking his two daughters with them. They encountered a
second storm; the storms on this lake are terrible and unexpected:
gusts of wind sweep out suddenly from the two mountain gorges which
run down into it on opposite sides and join battle on the water. The
Contessa wished to land in the midst of the hurricane and pealing
thunder; she insisted that, if she were to climb to a rock that stood
up by itself in the middle of the lake and was the size of a small
room, she would enjoy a curious spectacle; she would see herself
assailed on all sides by raging waves; but in jumping out of the boat
she fell into the water. Fabrizio dived in after her to save her, and
both were carried away for some distance. No doubt it is not a
pleasant thing to feel oneself drowning; but the spirit of boredom,
taken by surprise, was banished from the feudal castle. The Contessa
conceived a passionate enthusiasm for the primitive nature of the
Priore Blanès and for his astrology. The little money that remained
to her after the purchase of the boat had been spent on buying a
spy-glass, and almost every evening, with her nieces and Fabrizio, she
would take her stand on the platform of one of the Gothic towers of
the castle. Fabrizio was the learned one of the party, and they spent
many hours there very pleasantly, out of reach of the spies.

It must be admitted that there were days on which the Contessa did not
utter a word to anyone; she would be seen strolling under the tall
chestnuts lost in sombre meditations; she was too clever a woman not
to feel at times the tedium of having no one with whom to exchange
ideas. But next day she would be laughing as before: it was the
lamentations of her sister-in-law, the Marchesa, that produced these
sombre impressions on a mind naturally so active.

"Are we to spend all the youth that is left to us in this gloomy
castle?" the Marchesa used to exclaim.

Before the Contessa came, she had not had the courage even to feel
these regrets.

Such was their life during the winter of 1814 and 1815. On two
occasions, in spite of her poverty, the Contessa went to spend a few
days at Milan; she was anxious to see a sublime ballet by Vigano,
given at the Scala, and the Marchese raised no objections to his
wife's accompanying her sister-in-law. They went to draw the arrears
of the little pension, and it was the penniless widow of the Cisalpine
General who lent a few sequins to the millionaire Marchesa del Dongo.
These parties were delightful; they invited old friends to dinner, and
consoled themselves by laughing at everything, just like children.
This Italian gaiety, full of surprise and brio, made them forget the
atmosphere of sombre gloom which the stern faces of the Marchese and
his elder son spread around them at Grianta. Fabrizio, though barely
sixteen, represented the head of the house admirably.

On the 7th of March, 1815, the ladies had been back for two days after
a charming little excursion to Milan; they were strolling under the
fine avenue of plane trees, then recently extended to the very edge of
the lake. A boat appeared, coming from the direction of Como, and
made strange signals. One of the Marchese's agents leaped out upon the
bank: Napoleon had just landed from the Gulf of Juan. Europe was kind
enough to be surprised at this event, which did not at all surprise
the Marchese del Dongo; he wrote his Sovereign a letter full of the
most cordial effusion; he offered him his talents and several millions
of money, and informed him once again that his Ministers were Jacobins
and in league with the ringleaders in Paris.

On the 8th of March, at six o'clock in the morning, the Marchese,
wearing all his orders, was making his elder son dictate to him the
draft of a third political despatch; he was solemnly occupied in
transcribing this in his fine and careful hand, upon paper that bore
the Sovereign's effigy as a watermark. At the same moment, Fabrizio
was knocking at Contessa Pietranera's door.

"I am off," he informed her, "I am going to join the Emperor who is
also King of Italy; he was such a good friend to your husband! I shall
travel through Switzerland. Last night, at Menaggio, my friend Vasi,
the dealer in barometers, gave me his passport; now you must give me a
few napoleons, for I have only a couple on me; but if necessary I
shall go on foot."

The Contessa wept with joy and grief. "Great Heavens! What can have
put that idea into your head?" she cried, seizing Fabrizio's hands in
her own.

She rose and went to fetch from the linen-cupboard, where it was
carefully hidden, a little purse embroidered with pearls; it was all
that she possessed in the world.

"Take it," she said to Fabrizio; "but, in heaven's name, do not let
yourself be killed. What will your poor mother and I have left, if you
are taken from us? As for Napoleon's succeeding, that, my poor boy,
is impossible; our gentlemen will certainly manage to destroy him. Did
you not hear, a week ago, at Milan the story of the twenty-three plots
to assassinate him, all so carefully planned, from which it was only
by a miracle that he escaped? And at that time he was all-powerful.
And you have seen that it is not the will to destroy him that is
lacking in our enemies; France ceased to count after he left it."

It was in a tone of the keenest emotion that the Contessa spoke to
Fabrizio of the fate in store for Napoleon. "In allowing you to go
to join him, I am sacrificing to him the dearest thing I have in the
world," she said. Fabrizio's eyes grew moist, he shed tears as he
embraced the Contessa, but his determination to be off was never for a
moment shaken. He explained with effusion to this beloved friend all
the reasons that had led to his decision, reasons which we take the
liberty of finding highly attractive.

"Yesterday evening, it wanted seven minutes to six, we were strolling,
you remember, by the shore of the lake along the plane avenue, below
the _casa Sommariva_, and we were facing the south. It was there that
I first noticed, in the distance, the boat that was coming from
Como, bearing such great tidings. As I looked at this boat without
thinking of the Emperor, and only envying the lot of those who are
free to travel, suddenly I felt myself seized by a profound emotion.
The boat touched ground, the agent said something in a low tone to my
father, who changed colour, and took us aside to announce the
_terrible news_. I turned towards the lake with no other object but to
hide the tears of joy that were flooding my eyes. Suddenly, at an
immense height in the sky and on my right-hand side, I saw an eagle,
the bird of Napoleon; he flew majestically past making for
Switzerland, and consequently for Paris. 'And I too,' I said to
myself at that moment, 'will fly across Switzerland with the speed
of an eagle, and will go to offer that great man a very little thing,
but the only thing, after all, that I have to offer him, the support
of my feeble arm. He wished to give us a country, and he loved my
uncle.' At that instant, while I was gazing at the eagle, in some
strange way my tears ceased to flow; and the proof that this idea came
from above is that at the same moment, without any discussion, I made
up my mind to go, and saw how the journey might be made. In the
twinkling of an eye all the sorrows that, as you know, are poisoning
my life, especially on Sundays, seemed to be swept away by a breath
from heaven. I saw that mighty figure of Italy raise herself from the
mire in which the Germans keep her plunged; [Footnote: The speaker is
carried away by passion; he is rendering in prose some lines of the
famous Monti.] she stretched out her mangled arms still half loaded
with chains towards her King and Liberator. 'And I,' I said to myself,
'a son as yet unknown to fame of that unhappy Mother, I shall go forth
to die or to conquer with that man marked out by destiny, who sought
to cleanse us from the scorn that is heaped upon us by even the most
enslaved and the vilest among the inhabitants of Europe.'

"You know," he added in a low tone drawing nearer to' the Contessa,
and fastening upon her a pair of eyes from which fire darted, "you
know that young chestnut which my mother, in the winter in which I was
born, planted with her own hands beside the big spring in our forest,
two leagues from here; before doing anything else I wanted to visit
it. 'The spring is not far advanced,' I said to myself, 'very well,
if my tree is in leaf, that shall be a sign for me. I also must emerge
from the state of torpor in which I am languishing in this cold and
dreary castle.' Do you not feel that these old blackened walls, the
symbols now as they were once the instruments of despotism, are a
perfect image of the dreariness of winter? They are to me what winter
is to my tree.

"Would you believe it, Gina? Yesterday evening at half past seven I
came to my chestnut; it had leaves, pretty little leaves that were
quite big already! I kissed them, carefully so as not to hurt them. I
turned the soil reverently round the dear tree. At once filled with a
fresh enthusiasm, I crossed the mountain; I came to Menaggio: I needed
a passport to enter Switzerland. The time had flown, it was already
one o'clock in the morning when I found myself at Vasi's door. I
thought that I should have to knock for a long time to arouse him, but
he was sitting up with three of his friends. At the first word I
uttered: 'You are going to join Napoleon,' he cried; and he fell on
my neck. The others too embraced me with rapture. 'Why am I
married?' I heard one of them say."

Signora Pietranera had grown pensive. She felt that she must offer a
few objections. If Fabrizio had had the slightest experience of life,
he would have seen quite well that the Contessa herself did not
believe in the sound reasons which she hastened to urge on him. But,
failing experience, he had resolution; he did not condescend even to
hear what those reasons were. The Contessa presently came down to
making him promise that at least he would inform his mother of his
intention.

"She will tell my sisters, and those women will betray me without
knowing it!" cried Fabrizio with a sort of heroic grandeur.

"You should speak more respectfully," said the Contessa, smiling
through her tears, "of the sex that will make your fortune; for you
will never appeal to men, you have too much fire for prosaic souls."

The Marchesa dissolved in tears on learning her son's strange plan;
she could not feel its heroism, and did everything in her power to
keep him at home. When she was convinced that nothing in the world,
except the walls of a prison, could prevent him from starting, she
handed over to him the little money that she possessed; then she
remembered that she had also, the day before, received nine or ten
small diamonds, worth perhaps ten thousand francs, which the Marchese
had entrusted to her to take to Milan to be set. Fabrizio's sisters
came ulto their mother's room while the Contessa was sewing these
diamonds into our hero's travelling coat; he handed the poor women
back their humble napoleons. His sisters were so enthusiastic over
his plan, they kissed him with so clamorous a joy that he took in his
hand the diamonds that had still to be concealed and was for starting
off there and then.

"You will betray me without knowing it," he said to his sisters.
"Since I have all this money, there is no need to take clothes; one
can get them anywhere." He embraced these dear ones and set off at
once without even going back to his own room. He walked so fast,
afraid of being followed by men on horseback, that before night he had
entered Lugano. He was now, thank heaven, in a Swiss town, and had no
longer any fear of being waylaid on the lonely road by constables
in his father's pay. From this haven, he wrote him a fine letter, a
boyish weakness which gave strength and substance to the Marchese's
anger. Fabrizio took the post, crossed the Saint-Gothard; his progress
was rapid, and he entered France by Pontarlier. The Emperor was in
Paris. There Fabrizio's troubles began; he had started out with the
firm intention of speaking to the Emperor: it had never occurred to
him that this might be a difficult matter. At Milan, ten times daily
he used to see Prince Eugène, and could have spoken to him had he
wished. In Paris, every morning he went to the courtyard of the
Tuileries to watch the reviews held by Napoleon; but never was he able
to come near the Emperor. Our hero imagined all the French to be
profoundly disturbed, as he himself was, by the extreme peril in which
their country lay. At table in the hotel in which he was staying, he
made no mystery about his plans; he found several young men with
charming manners, even more enthusiastic than himself, who, in a very
few days, did not fail to rob him of all the money that he possessed.
Fortunately, out of pure modesty, he had said nothing of the diamonds
given him by his mother. On the morning when, after an orgy overnight,
he found that he had been decidedly robbed, he bought a fine pair of
horses, engaged as servant an old soldier, one of the dealer's grooms,
and, filled with contempt for the young men of Paris with their fine
speeches, set out to join the army. He knew nothing except that it
was concentrated near Maubeuge. No sooner had he reached the frontier
than he felt that it would be absurd for him to stay in a house,
toasting himself before a good fire, when there were soldiers in
bivouac outside. In spite of the remonstrances of his servant, who was
not lacking in common sense, he rashly made his way to the bivouacs on
the extreme frontier, on the road into Belgium. No sooner had he
reached the first battalion that was resting by the side of the road
than the soldiers began to stare at the sight of this young civilian
in whose appearance there was nothing that suggested uniform. Night
was falling, a cold wind blew. Fabrizio went up to a fire and offered
to pay for hospitality. The soldiers looked at one another amazed
more than anything at the idea of payment, and willingly made room for
him by the fire. His servant constructed a shelter for him. But, an
hour later, the _adjudant_ of the regiment happening to pass near the
bivouac, the soldiers went to report to him the arrival of this
stranger speaking bad French. The _adjudant_ questioned Fabrizio, who
spoke to him of his enthusiasm for the Emperor in an accent which
aroused grave suspicion; whereupon this under-officer requested our
hero to go with him to the Colonel, whose headquarters were in a
neighbouring farm. Fabrizio's servant came up with the two horses. The
sight of them seemed to make so forcible an impression upon the
_adjudant_ that immediately he changed his mind and began to
interrogate the servant also. The latter, an old soldier, guessing
his questioner's plan of campaign from the first, spoke of the
powerful protection which his master enjoyed, adding that certainly
they would not _bone_ his fine horses. At once a soldier called by the
_adjudant_ put his hand on the servant's collar; another soldier took
charge of the horses, and, with an air of severity, the _adjudant_
ordered Fabrizio to follow him and not to answer back.

After making him cover a good league on foot, in the darkness rendered
apparently more intense by the fires of the bivouacs which lighted the
horizon on every side, the adjutant handed Fabrizio over to an officer
of _gendarmerie_ who, with a grave air, asked for his papers. Fabrizio
showed his passport, which described him as a dealer in barometers
travelling with his wares.

"What fools they are!" cried the officer; "this really is too much."

He put a number of questions to our hero, who spoke of the Emperor and
of Liberty in terms of the keenest enthusiasm; whereupon the officer
of _gendarmerie_ went off in peals of laughter.

"Gad! You're no good at telling a tale!" he cried. "It is a bit too
much of a good thing their daring to send us young mugs like you!" And
despite all the protestations of Fabrizio, who was dying to explain
that he was not really a dealer in barometers, the officer sent him to
the prison of B----, a small town in the neighbourhood, where our hero
arrived at about three o'clock in the morning, beside himself with
rage and half dead with exhaustion.

Fabrizio, astonished at first, then furious, understanding absolutely
nothing of what was happening to him, spent thirty-three long days in
this wretched prison; he wrote letter after letter to the town
commandant, and it was the gaoler's wife, a handsome Fleming of
six-and-thirty, who undertook to deliver them. But as she had no wish
to see so nice-looking a boy shot, and as moreover he paid well, she
put all these letters without fail in the fire. Late in the evening,
she would deign to come in and listen to the prisoner's complaints;
she had told her husband that the young greenhorn had money, after
which the prudent gaoler allowed her a free hand. She availed herself
of this licence and received several gold napoleons in return, for the
_adjudant_ had taken only the horses, and the officer of _gendarmerie_
had confiscated nothing at all. One afternoon in the month of June,
Fabrizio heard a violent cannonade at some distance. So they were
fighting at last! His heart leaped with impatience. He heard also a
great deal of noise in the town; as a matter of fact a big movement of
troops was being effected; three divisions were passing through B----.
When, about eleven o'clock, the gaoler's wife came in to share his
griefs, Fabrizio was even more friendly than usual; then, seizing hold
of her hands:

"Get me out of here; I swear on my honour to return to prison as soon
as they have stopped fighting."

"Stuff and nonsense! Have you the _quibus_?" He seemed worried; he did
not understand the word _quibus_. The gaoler's wife, noticing his
dismay, decided that he must be in low water, and instead of talking
in gold napoleons as she had intended talked now only in francs.

"Listen," she said to him, "if you can put down a hundred francs, I
will place a double napoleon on each eye of the corporal who comes to
change the guard during the night. He won't be able to see you
breaking out of prison, and if his regiment is to march to-morrow he
will accept."

The bargain was soon struck. The gaoler's wife even consented to hide
Fabrizio in her own room, from which he could more easily make his
escape in the morning.

Next day, before dawn, the woman, who was quite moved, said to
Fabrizio:

"My dear boy, you are still far too young for that dirty trade; take
my advice, don't go back to it."

"What!" stammered Fabrizio, "is it a crime then to wish to defend
one's country?"

"Enough said. Always remember that I saved your life; your case was
clear, you would have been shot. But don't say a word to anyone, or
you will lose my husband and me our job; and whatever you do, don't go
about repeating that silly tale about being a gentleman from Milan
disguised as a dealer in barometers, it's too stupid. Listen to me
now, I'm going to give you the uniform of a hussar who died the other
day in the prison; open your mouth as little as you possibly can; but
if a serjeant or an officer asks you questions so that you have to
answer, say that you've been lying ill in the house of a peasant who
took you in out of charity when you were shivering with fever in a
ditch by the roadside. If that does not satisfy them, you can add that
you are going back to your regiment. They may perhaps arrest you
because of your accent; then say that you were born in Piedmont, that
you're a conscript who was left in France last year, and all that sort
of thing."

For the first time, after thirty-three days of blind fury, Fabrizio
grasped the clue to all that had happened. They took him for a spy. He
argued with the gaoler's wife, who, that morning, was most
affectionate; and finally, while armed with a needle she was taking in
the hussar's uniform to fit him, he told his whole story in so many
words to the astonished woman. For an instant she believed him; he had
so innocent an air, and looked so nice dressed as a hussar.

"Since you have such a desire to fight," she said to him at length
half convinced, "what you ought to have done as soon as you reached
Paris was to enlist in a regiment. If you had paid for a serjeant's
drink, the whole thing would have been settled." The gaoler's wife
added much good advice for the future, and finally, at the first
streak of dawn, let Fabrizio out of the house, after making him swear
a hundred times over that he would never mention her name, whatever
happened. As soon as Fabrizio had left the little town, marching
boldly with the hussar's sabre under his arm, he was seized by a
scruple. "Here I am," he said to himself, "with the clothes and the
marching orders of a hussar who died in prison, where he was sent,
they say, for stealing a cow and some silver plate! I have, so to
speak, inherited his identity ... and without wishing it or
expecting it in any way! Beware of prison! The omen is clear, I shall
have much to suffer from prisons!"

Not an hour had passed since Fabrizio's parting from his benefactress
when the rain began to fall with such violence that the new hussar was
barely able to get along, hampered by a pair of heavy boots which had
not been made for him. Meeting a peasant mounted upon a sorry horse,
he bought the animal, explaining by signs what he wanted; the gaoler's
wife had recommended him to speak as little as possible, in view of
his accent.

That day the army, which had just won the battle of Ligny, was
marching straight on Brussels. It was the eve of the battle of
Waterloo. Towards midday, the rain still continuing to fall in
torrents, Fabrizio heard the sound of the guns; this joy made him
completely oblivious of the fearful moments of despair in which so
unjust an imprisonment had plunged him. He rode on until late at
night, and, as he was beginning to have a little common sense, went to
seek shelter in a peasant's house a long way from the road. This
peasant wept and pretended that everything had been taken from him;
Fabrizio gave him a crown, and he found some . barley. "My horse is no
beauty," Fabrizio said to himself, "but that makes no difference, he
may easily take the fancy of some _adjutant_," and he went to lie down
in the stable by its side. An hour before dawn Fabrizio was on the
road, and, by copious endearments, succeeded in making his horse trot.
About five o'clock, he heard the cannonade: it was the preliminaries
of Waterloo.




CHAPTER THREE

Fabrizio soon came upon some _vivandières_, and the extreme gratitude
that he felt for the gaoler's wife of B---- impelled him to address
them; he asked one of them where he would find the 4th Hussar
Regiment, to which he belonged.

"You would do just as well not to be in such a hurry, young soldier,"
said the _cantinière_, touched by Fabrizio's pallor and glowing eyes.
"Your wrist is not strong enough yet for the sabre-thrusts they'll be
giving to-day. If you had a musket, I don't say, maybe you could let
off your round as well as any of them."

This advice displeased Fabrizio; but however much he urged on his
horse, he could go no faster than the _cantinière_ in her cart.
Every now and then the sound of the guns seemed to come nearer and
prevented them from hearing each other speak, for Fabrizio was so
beside himself with enthusiasm and delight that he had renewed the
conversation. Every word uttered by the _cantinière_ intensified his
happiness by making him understand it. With the exception of his
real name and his escape from prison, he ended by confiding everything
to this woman who seemed such a good soul. She was greatly surprised
and understood nothing at all of what this handsome young soldier was
telling her.

"I see what it is," she exclaimed at length with an air of triumph.
"You're a young gentleman who has fallen in love with the wife of some
captain in the 4th Hussars. Your mistress will have made you a present
of the uniform you're wearing, and you're going after her. As sure as
God's in heaven, you've never been a soldier; but, like the brave
boy you are, seeing your regiment's under fire, you want to be there
too, and not let them think you a chicken."

Fabrizio agreed with everything; it was his only way of procuring good
advice. "I know nothing of the ways of these French people," he said
to himself, "and if I am not guided by someone I shall find myself
being put in prison again, and they'll steal my horse."

"First of all, my boy," said the _cantinière_, who was becoming more
and more of a friend to him, "confess that you're not one-and-twenty:
at the very most you might be seventeen."

This was the truth, and Fabrizio admitted as much with good grace.

"Then, you aren't even a conscript; it's simply because of Madame's
pretty face that you're going to get your bones broken. Plague it, she
can't be particular. If you've still got some of the _yellow-boys_ she
sent you, you must first of all buy yourself another horse; look how
your screw pricks up his ears when the guns sound at all near; that's
a peasant's horse, and will be the death of you as soon as you reach
the line. That white smoke you see over there above the hedge, that's
the infantry firing, my boy. So prepare for a fine fright when you
hear the bullets whistling over you. You'll do as well to eat a bit
while there's still time."

Fabrizio followed this advice and, presenting a napoleon to the
_vivandière_, asked her to accept payment.

"It makes one weep to see him!" cried the woman; "the poor child
doesn't even know how to spend his money! It would be no more than you
deserve if I pocketed your napoleon and put Cocotte into a trot;
damned if your screw could catch me up. What would you do, stupid, if
you saw me go off? Bear in mind, when the _brute_ growls, never to
show your gold. Here," she went on, "here's 18 francs, 50 centimes,
and your breakfast costs you 30 sous. Now, we shall soon have some
horses for sale. If the beast is a small one, you'll give ten francs,
and, in any case, never more than twenty, not if it was the horse of
the Four Sons of Aymon."

The meal finished, the _vivandière_, who was still haranguing, was
interrupted by a woman who had come across the fields and passed them
on the road.

"Hallo there, hi!" this woman shouted. "Hallo, Margot! Your 6th Light
are over there on the right."

"I must leave you, my boy," said the _vivandière_ to our hero; "but
really and truly I pity you; I've taken quite a fancy to you, upon my
word I have. You don't know a thing about anything, you're going to
get a wipe in the eye, as sure as God's in heaven! Come along to the
6th Light with me."

"I quite understand that I know nothing," Fabrizio told her, "but I
want to fight, and I'm determined to go over there towards that white
smoke."

"Look how your horse is twitching his ears! As soon as he gets over
there, even if he's no strength left, he'll take the bit in his teeth
and start galloping, and heaven only knows where he'll land you. Will
you listen to me now? As soon as you get to the troops, pick up a
musket and a cartridge pouch, get down among the men and copy what you
see them do, exactly the same: But, good heavens, I'll bet you don't
even know how to open a cartridge."

Fabrizio, stung to the quick, admitted nevertheless to his new friend
that she had guessed aright.

"Poor boy! He'll be killed straight away; sure as God! It won't take
long. You've got to come with me, absolutely," went on the
_cantinière_ in a tone of authority.

"But I want to fight."

"You shall fight too; why, the 6th Light are famous fighters, and
there's fighting enough to-day for everyone."

"But shall we come soon to the regiment?"

"In a quarter of an hour at the most."

"With this honest woman's recommendation," Fabrizio told himself, "my
ignorance of everything won't make them take me for a spy, and I shall
have a chance of fighting." At this moment the noise of the guns
redoubled, each explosion coming straight on top of the last. "It's
like a Rosary," said Fabrizio.

"We're beginning to hear the infantry fire now," said the
_vivandière_, whipping up her little horse, which seemed quite excited
by the firing.

The _cantinière_ turned to the right and took a side road that ran
through the fields; there was a foot of mud in it; the little cart
seemed about to be stuck fast: Fabrizio pushed the wheel. His horse
fell twice; presently the road, though with less water on it, was
nothing more than a bridle path through the grass. Fabrizio had not
gone five hundred yards when his nag stopped short: it was a corpse,
lying across the path, which terrified horse and rider alike.

Fabrizio's face, pale enough by nature, assumed a markedly green
tinge; the _cantinière_, after looking at the dead man, said, as
though speaking to herself: "That's not one of our Division." Then,
raising her eyes to our hero, she burst out laughing.

"Aha, my boy! There's a titbit for you!" Fabrizio sat frozen. What
struck him most of all was the dirtiness of the feet of this corpse
which had already been stripped of its shoes and left with nothing but
an old pair of trousers all clotted with blood.

"Come nearer," the _cantinière_ ordered him, "get off your horse,
you'll have to get accustomed to them; look," she cried, "he's stopped
one in the head."

A bullet, entering on one side of the nose, had gone out at the
opposite temple, and disfigured the corpse in a hideous fashion. It
lay with one eye still open.

"Get off your horse then, lad," said the _cantinière_, "and give him a
shake of the hand to see if he'll return it."

Without hesitation, although ready to yield up his soul with disgust,
Fabrizio flung himself from his horse and took the hand of the corpse
which he shook vigorously; then he stood still as though paralysed. He
felt that he had not the strength to mount again. What horrified him
more than anything was that open eye.

"The _vivandière_ will think me a coward," he said to himself
bitterly. But he felt the impossibility of making any movement; he
would have fallen. It was a frightful moment; Fabrizio was on the
point of being physically sick. The _vivandière_ noticed this, jumped
lightly down from her little carriage, and held out to him, without
saying a word, a glass of brandy which he swallowed at a gulp; he was
able to mount his screw, and continued on his way without speaking.
The _vivandière_ looked at him now and again from the corner of her
eye.

"You shall fight to-morrow, my boy," she said at length; "to-day
you're going to stop with me. You can see now that you've got to learn
the business before you can become a soldier."

"On the contrary, I want to start fighting at once," exclaimed our
hero with a sombre air which seemed to the vivandière to augur well.
The noise of the guns grew twice as loud and seemed to be coming
nearer. The explosions began to form a continuous bass; there was no
interval between one and the next, and above this running bass,
which suggested the roar of a torrent in the distance, they could make
out quite plainly the rattle of musketry.

At this point the road dived down into a clump of trees. The
_vivandière_ saw three or four soldiers of our army who were coming
towards her as fast as their legs would carry them; she jumped nimbly
down from her cart and ran into cover fifteen or twenty paces from the
road. She hid herself in a hole which had been left where a big tree
had recently been uprooted. "Now," thought Fabrizio, "we shall see
whether I am a coward!" He stopped by the side of the little cart
which the woman had abandoned, and drew his sabre. The soldiers paid
no attention to him and passed at a run along the wood, to the left of
the road.

"They're ours," said the _vivandière_ calmly, as she came back, quite
breathless, to her little cart.... "If your horse was capable of
galloping, I should say: push ahead as far as the end of the wood, and
see if there's anyone on the plain." Fabrizio did not wait to be told
twice, he tore off a branch from a poplar, stripped it and started to
lash his horse with all his might; the animal broke into a gallop for
a moment, then fell back into its regular slow trot. The _vivandière_
had put her horse into a gallop. "Stop, will you, stop!" she called
after Fabrizio. Presently both were clear of the wood. Coming to the
edge of the plain, they heard a terrifying din, guns and muskets
thundered on every side, right, left, behind them. And as the clump
of trees from which they emerged grew on a mound rising nine or ten
feet above the plain, they could see fairly well a corner of the
battle; but still there was no one to be seen in the meadow beyond the
wood. This meadow was bordered, half a mile away, by a long row of
willows, very bushy; above the willows appeared a white smoke which
now and again rose eddying into the sky.

"If I only knew where the regiment was," said the cantinière, in some
embarrassment. "It won't do to go straight ahead over this big field.
By the way," she said to Fabrizio, "if you see one of the enemy, stick
him with the point of your sabre, don't play about with the blade."

At this moment, the cantinière caught sight of the four soldiers whom
we mentioned a little way back; they were coming out of the wood on to
the plain to the left of the road. One of them was on horseback.

"There you are," she said to Fabrizio. "Hallo there!" she called to
the mounted man, "come over here and have a glass of brandy." The
soldiers approached.

"Where are the 6th Light?" she shouted.

"Over there, five minutes away, across that canal that runs along by
the willows; why, Colonel Macon has just been killed."

"Will you take five francs for your horse, you?"

"Five francs! That's not a bad one, _ma_! An officer's horse I can
sell in ten minutes for five napoleons."

"Give me one of your napoleons," said the _vivandière_ to Fabrizio.
Then going up to the mounted soldier: "Get off, quickly," she said to
him, "here's your napoleon."

The soldier dismounted, Fabrizio sprang gaily on to the saddle, the
_vivandière_ unstrapped the little portmanteau which was on his old
horse.

"Come and help me, all of you!" she said to the soldiers, "is that the
way you leave a lady to do the work?"

But no sooner had the captured horse felt the weight of the
portmanteau than he began to rear, and Fabrizio, who was an excellent
horseman, had to use all his strength to hold him.

"A good sign!" said the _vivandière_, "the gentleman is not accustomed
to being tickled by portmanteaus."

"A general's horse," cried the man who had sold it, "a horse that's
worth ten napoleons if it's worth a Hard."

"Here are twenty francs," said Fabrizio, who could not contain himself
for joy at feeling between his legs a horse that could really move.

At that moment a shot struck the line of willows, through which it
passed obliquely, and Fabrizio had the curious spectacle of all those
little branches flying this way and that as though mown down by a
stroke of the scythe.

"Look, there's the _brute_ advancing," the soldier said to him as he
took the twenty francs. It was now about two o'clock.

Fabrizio was still under the spell of this strange spectacle when a
party of generals, followed by a score of hussars, passed at a gallop
across one corner of the huge field on the edge of which he had
halted: his horse neighed, reared several times in succession, then
began violently tugging the bridle that was holding him. "All right,
then," Fabrizio said to himself.

The horse, left to his own devices, dashed off hell for leather to
join the escort that was following the generals.

Fabrizio counted four gold-laced hats. A quarter of an hour later,
from a few words said by one hussar to the next, Fabrizio gathered
that one of these generals was the famous Marshal Ney. His happiness
knew no bounds; only he had no way of telling which of the four
generals was Marshal Ney; he would have given everything in the world
to know, but he remembered that he had been told not to speak. The
escort halted, having to cross a wide ditch left full of water by the
rain overnight; it was fringed with tall trees and formed the
left-hand boundary of the field at the entrance to which Fabrizio had
bought the horse. Almost all the hussars had dismounted; the bank of
the ditch was steep and very slippery and the water lay quite three or
four feet below the level of the field. Fabrizio, distracted with joy,
was thinking more of Marshal Ney and of glory than of his horse,
which, being highly excited, jumped into the canal, thus splashing the
water up to a considerable height. One of the generals was soaked to
the skin by the sheet of water, and cried with an oath: "Damn the
f---- brute!" Fabrizio felt deeply hurt by this insult. "Can I ask him
to apologise?" he wondered. Meanwhile, to prove that he was not so
clumsy after all, he set his horse to climb the opposite bank of the
ditch; but it rose straight up and was five or six feet high. He had
to abandon the attempt; then he rode up stream, his horse being up to
its head in water, and at last found a sort of drinking-place. By this
gentle slope he was easily able to reach the field on the other side
of the canal. He was the first man of the escort to appear there; he
started to trot proudly down the bank; below him, in the canal, the
hussars were splashing about, somewhat embarrassed by their position,
for in many places the water was five feet deep. Two or three horses
took fright and began to swim, making an appalling mess. A serjeant
noticed the manœuvre that this youngster, who looked so very unlike a
soldier, had just carried out.

"Up here! There is a watering-place on the left!" he shouted, and in
time they all crossed.

On reaching the farther bank, Fabrizio had found the generals there
by themselves; the noise of the guns seemed to him to have doubled;
and it was all he could do to hear the general whom he had given such
a good soaking and who now shouted in his ear:

"Where did you get that horse?"

Fabrizio was so much upset that he answered in Italian:

"_L'ho comprato poco fa_." (I bought it just now.)

"What's that you say?" cried the general.

But the din at that moment became so terrific that Fabrizio could not
answer him. We must admit that our hero was very little of a hero at
that moment. However, fear came to him only as a secondary
consideration; he was principally shocked by the noise, which hurt his
ears. The escort broke into a gallop; they crossed a large batch of
tilled land which lay beyond the canal. And this field was strewn with
dead.

"Red-coats! red-coats!" the hussars of the escort exclaimed joyfully,
and at first Fabrizio did not understand; then he noticed that as a
matter of fact almost all these bodies wore red uniforms. One detail
made him shudder with horror; he observed that many of these
unfortunate red-coats were still alive; they were calling out,
evidently asking for help, and no one stopped to give it them. Our
hero, being most humane, took every possible care that his horse
should not tread upon any of the red-coats. The escort halted;
Fabrizio, who was not paying sufficient attention to his military
duty, galloped on, his eyes fixed on a wounded wretch in front of him.

"Will you halt, you young fool!" the serjeant shouted after him.
Fabrizio discovered that he was twenty paces on the generals' right
front, and precisely in the direction in which they were gazing
through their glasses. As he came back to take his place behind the
other hussars, who had halted a few paces in rear of them, he noticed
the biggest of these generals, who was speaking to his neighbour, a
general also, in a tone of authority and almost of reprimand; he was
swearing. Fabrizio could not contain his curiosity; and, in spite of
the warning not to speak, given him by his friend the gaoler's wife,
he composed a short sentence in good French, quite correct, and said
to his neighbour:

"Who is that general who is chewing up the one next to him?"

"Gad, it's the Marshal!"

"What Marshal?"

"Marshal Ney, you fool! I say, where have you been serving?"

Fabrizio, although highly susceptible, had no thought of resenting
this insult; he was studying, lost in childish admiration, the
famous Prince de la Moskowa, the "Bravest of the Brave."

Suddenly they all moved off at full gallop. A few minutes later
Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead of him, a ploughed field the surface
of which was moving in a singular fashion. The furrows were full of
water and the soil, very damp, which formed the ridges between these
furrows kept flying off in little black lumps three or four feet into
the air. Fabrizio noticed as he passed this curious effect; then his
thoughts turned to dreaming of the Marshal and his glory. He heard a
sharp cry close to him; two hussars fell struck by shot; and, when he
looked back at them, they were already twenty paces behind the escort.
What seemed to him horrible was a horse streaming with blood that was
struggling on the ploughed land, its hooves caught in its own
entrails; it was trying to follow the others: its blood ran down into
the mire.

"Ah! So I am under fire at last!" he said to himself. "I have seen
shots fired!" he repeated with a sense of satisfaction. "Now I am a
real soldier." At that moment, the escort began to go hell for
leather, and our hero realised that it was shot from the guns that was
making the earth fly up all round him. He looked vainly in the
direction from which the balls were coming, he saw the white smoke of
the battery at an enormous distance, and, in the thick of the steady
and continuous rumble produced by the artillery fire, he seemed to
hear shots discharged much closer at hand: he could not understand in
the least what was happening.

At that moment, the generals and their escort dropped into a little
road filled with water which ran five feet below the level of the
fields.

The Marshal halted and looked again through his glasses. Fabrizio,
this time, could examine him at his leisure. He found him to be very
fair, with a big red face. "We don't have any faces like that in
Italy," he said to himself. "With my pale cheeks and chestnut hair, I
shall never look like that," he added despondently. To him these words
implied: "I shall never be a hero." He looked at the hussars; with a
solitary exception, all of them had yellow moustaches. If Fabrizio was
studying the hussars of the escort, they were all studying him as
well. Their stare made him blush, and, to get rid of his
embarrassment, he turned his head towards the enemy. They consisted of
widely extended lines of men in red, but, what greatly surprised him,
these men seemed to be quite minute. Their long files, which were
regiments or divisions, appeared no taller than hedges. A line of red
cavalry were trotting in the direction of the sunken road along which
the Marshal and his escort had begun to move at a walk, splashing
through the mud. The smoke made it impossible to distinguish anything
in the direction in which they were advancing; now and then one saw
men moving at a gallop against this background of white smoke.

Suddenly, from the direction of the enemy, Fabrizio saw four men
approaching hell for leather. "Ah! We are attacked," he said to
himself; then he saw two of these men speak to the Marshal. One of the
generals on the latter's staff set off at a gallop towards the enemy,
followed by two hussars of the escort and by the four men who had just
come up. After a little canal which they all crossed, Fabrizio found
himself riding beside a serjeant who seemed a good-natured fellow. "I
must speak to this one," he said to himself, "then perhaps they'll
stop staring at me." He thought for a long time.

"Sir, this is the first time that I have been present at a battle," he
said at length to the serjeant. "But is this a real battle?"

"Something like. But who are you?"

"I am the brother of a captain's wife."

"And what is he called, your captain?"

Our hero was terribly embarrassed; he had never anticipated this
question. Fortunately, the Marshal and his escort broke into a gallop.
"What French name shall I say?" he wondered. At last he remembered
the name of the innkeeper with whom he had lodged in Paris; he brought
his horse up to the serjeant's, and shouted to him at the top of his
voice:

"Captain Meunier!" The other, not hearing properly in the roar of the
guns, replied: "Oh, Captain Teulier? Well, he's been killed."
"Splendid," thought Fabrizio. "Captain Teulier; I must look sad."

"Good God!" he cried; and assumed a piteous mien. They had left the
sunken road and were crossing a small meadow, they were going hell for
leather, shots were coming over again, the Marshal headed for a
division of cavalry. The escort found themselves surrounded by dead
and wounded men; but this sight had already ceased to make any
impression on our hero; he had other things to think of.

While the escort was halted, he caught sight of the little cart of a
_cantinière_, and his affection for this honourable corps sweeping
aside every other consideration, set off at a gallop to join her.

"Stay where you are, curse you," the serjeant shouted after him.

"What can he do to me here?" thought Fabrizio, and he continued to
gallop towards the cantinière. When he put spurs to his horse, he had
had some hope that it might be his good _cantinière_ of the morning;
the horse and the little cart bore a strong resemblance, but their
owner was quite different, and our hero thought her appearance most
forbidding. As he came up to her, Fabrizio heard her say: "And he was
such a fine-looking man, too!" A very ugly sight awaited the new
recruit; they were sawing off a cuirassier's leg at the thigh, a
handsome young fellow of five feet ten. Fabrizio shut his eyes and
drank four glasses of brandy straight off.

"How you do go for it, you boozer!" cried the _cantinière_. The
brandy gave him an idea: "I must buy the goodwill of my comrades, the
hussars of the escort."

"Give me the rest of the bottle," he said to the _vivandière_.

"What do you mean," was her answer, "what's left there costs ten
francs, on a day like this."

As he rejoined the escort at a gallop :

"Ah! You're bringing us a drop of drink," cried the serjeant. "That
was why you deserted, was it? Hand it over."

The bottle went round, the last man to take it flung it in the air
after drinking. "Thank you, chum!" he cried to Fabrizio. All eyes
were fastened on him kindly. This friendly gaze lifted a hundredweight
from Fabrizio's heart; it was one of those hearts of too delicate
tissue which require the friendship of those around it. So at last he
had ceased to be looked at askance by his comrades; there was a bond
between them! Fabrizio breathed a deep sigh of relief, then in a bold
voice said to the serjeant:

"And if Captain Teulier has been killed, where shall I find my
sister?" He fancied himself a little Machiavelli to be saying Teulier
so naturally instead of Meunier.

"That's what you'll find out to-night," was the serjeant's reply.

The escort moved on again and made for some divisions of infantry.
Fabrizio felt quite drunk; he had taken too much brandy, he was
rolling slightly in his saddle: he remembered most opportunely a
favourite saying of his mother's coachman: "When you've been lifting
your elbow, look straight between your horse's ears, and do what the
man next you does." The Marshal stopped for some time beside a number
of cavalry units which he ordered to charge; but for an hour or two
our hero was barely conscious of what was going on round about him. He
was feeling extremely tired, and when his horse galloped he fell back
on the saddle like a lump of lead.

Suddenly the serjeant called out to his men: "Don't you see the
Emperor, curse you!" Whereupon the escort shouted: "_Vive
l'Empereur_!" at the top of their voices. It may be imagined that our
hero stared till his eyes started out of his head, but all he saw was
some generals galloping, also followed by an escort. The long
floating plumes of horsehair which the dragoons of the bodyguard wore
on their helmets prevented him from distinguishing their faces. "So I
have missed seeing the Emperor on a field of battle, all because of
those cursed glasses of brandy!" This reflexion brought him back to
his senses.

They went down into a road filled with water, the horses wished to
drink.

"So that was the Emperor who went past then?" he asked the man next to
him.

"Why, surely, the one with no braid on his coat. How is it you didn't
see him?" his comrade answered kindly. Fabrizio felt a strong desire
to gallop after the Emperor's escort and embody himself in it. What a
joy to go really to war in the train of that hero! It was for that
that he had come to France. "I am quite at liberty to do it," he said
to himself, "for after all I have no other reason for being where I am
but the will of my horse, which started galloping after these
generals."

What made Fabrizio decide to stay where he was was that the hussars,
his new comrades, seemed so friendly towards him; he began to
imagine himself the intimate friend of all the troopers with whom he
had been galloping for the last few hours. He saw arise between them
and himself that noble friendship of the heroes of Tasso and Ariosto.
If he were to attach himself to the Emperor's escort, there would be
fresh acquaintances to be made, perhaps they would look at him
askance, for these other horsemen were dragoons, and he was wearing
the hussar uniform like all the rest that were following the Marshal.
The way in which they now looked at him set our hero on a pinnacle of
happiness; he would have done anything in the world for his comrades;
his mind and soul were in the clouds. Everything seemed to have
assumed a new aspect now that he was among friends; he was dying to
ask them various questions. "But I am still a little drunk," he said
to himself, "I must bear in mind what the gaoler's wife told me." He
noticed on leaving the sunken road that the escort was no longer with
Marshal Ney; the general whom they were following was tall and thin,
with a dry face and an awe-inspiring eye.

This general was none other than Comte d'A----, the Lieutenant Robert
of the 15th of May, 1796. How delighted he would have been to meet
Fabrizio del Dongo!

It was already some time since Fabrizio had noticed the earth flying
off in black crumbs on being struck by shot; they came in rear of a
regiment of cuirassiers, he could hear distinctly the rattle of the
grapeshot against their breastplates, and saw several men fall.

The sun was now very low and had begun to set when the escort,
emerging from a sunken road, mounted a little bank three or four feet
high to enter a ploughed field. Fabrizio heard an odd little sound
quite close to him: he turned his head, four men had fallen with their
horses; the general himself had been unseated, but picked himself up,
covered in blood. Fabrizio looked at the hussars who were lying on the
ground: three of them were still making convulsive movements, the
fourth cried: "Pull me out!" The serjeant and two or three men had
dismounted to assist the general, who, leaning upon his aide-de-camp,
was attempting to walk a few. steps; he was trying to get away from
his horse, which lay on the ground struggling and kicking out madly.

The serjeant came up to Fabrizio. At that moment our hero heard a
voice say behind him and quite close to his ear: "This is the only one
that can still gallop." He felt himself seized by the feet; they were
taken out of the stirrups at the same time as someone caught him
underneath the arms; he was lifted over his horse's tail and then
allowed to slip to the ground, where he landed sitting.

The aide-de-camp took Fabrizio's horse by the bridle; the general,
with the help of the serjeant, mounted and rode off at a gallop; he
was quickly followed by the six men who were left of the escort.
Fabrizio rose up in a fury, and began to run after them shouting:
"_Ladri! Ladri_!" (Thieves! Thieves!) It was an amusing experience to
run after horse-stealers across a battlefield.

The escort and the general, Comte d'A----, disappeared presently
behind a row of willows. Fabrizio, blind with rage, also arrived at
this line of willows; he found himself brought to a halt by a canal of
considerable depth which he crossed. Then, on reaching the other
side, he began swearing again as he saw once more, but far away in the
distance, the general and his escort vanishing among the trees.
"Thieves! Thieves!" he cried, in French this time. In desperation, not
so much at the loss of his horse as at the treachery to himself, he
let himself sink down on the side of the ditch, tired out and dying of
hunger. If his fine horse had been taken from him by the enemy, he
would have thought no more about it; but to see himself betrayed and
robbed by that serjeant whom he liked so much and by those hussars
whom he regarded as brothers! That was what broke his heart. He could
find no consolation for so great an infamy, and, leaning his back
against a willow, began to shed hot tears. He abandoned one by one all
those beautiful dreams of a chivalrous and sublime friendship, like
that of the heroes of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_. To see death come to
one was nothing, surrounded by heroic and tender hearts, by noble
friends who clasp one by the hand as one yields one's dying breath!
But to retain one's enthusiasm surrounded by a pack of vile
scoundrels! Like all angry men Fabrizio exaggerated. After a quarter
of an hour of this melting mood, he noticed that the guns were
beginning to range on the row of trees in the shade of which he sat
meditating. He rose and tried to find his bearings. He scanned those
fields bounded by a wide canal and the row of pollard willows: he
thought he knew where he was. He saw a body of infantry crossing the
ditch and marching over the fields, a quarter of a league in front of
him. "I was just falling asleep," he said to himself; "I must see that
I'm not taken prisoner." And he put his best foot foremost. As he
advanced, his mind was set at rest; he recognized the uniforms, the
regiments by which he had been afraid of being cut off were French. He
made a right incline so as to join them.

After the moral anguish of having been so shamefully betrayed and
robbed, there came another which, at every moment, made itself felt
more keenly; he was dying of hunger. It was therefore with infinite
joy that after having walked, or rather run, for ten minutes, he saw
that the column of infantry, which also had been moving very rapidly,
was halting to take up a position. A few minutes later, he was among
the nearest of the soldiers.

"Friends, could you sell me a mouthful of bread?" "I say, here's a
fellow who thinks we're bakers!" This harsh utterance and the general
guffaw that followed it had a crushing effect on Fabrizio. So war was
no longer that noble and universal uplifting of souls athirst for
glory which he had imagined it to be from Napoleon's proclamations!
He sat down, or rather let himself fall on the grass; he turned very
pale. The soldier who had spoken to him, and who had stopped ten paces
off to clean the lock of his musket with his handkerchief, came nearer
and flung him a lump of bread; then, seeing that he did not pick it
up, broke off a piece which he put in our hero's mouth. Fabrizio
opened his eyes, and ate the bread without having the strength to
speak. When at length he looked round for the soldier to pay him, he
found himself alone; the men nearest to him were a hundred yards off
and were marching. Mechanically he rose and followed them. He entered
a wood; he was dropping with exhaustion, and already had begun to look
round for a comfortable resting-place; but what was his delight on
recognising first of all the horse, then the cart, and finally the
cantinière of that morning! She ran to him and was frightened by his
appearance.

"Still going, my boy," she said to him; "you're wounded then? And
where's your fine horse?" So saying she led him towards the cart, upon
which she made him climb, supporting him under the arms. No sooner
was he in the cart than our hero, utterly worn out, fell fast asleep.




CHAPTER FOUR

Nothing could awaken him, neither the muskets fired close to the cart
nor the trot of the horse which the _cantinière_ was flogging with all
her might. The regiment, attacked unexpectedly by swarms of Prussisn
cavalry, after imagining all day that they were winning the battle,
was beating a retreat or rather fleeing in the direction of France.

The colonel, a handsome young man, well turned out, who had succeeded
Macon, was sabred; the battalion commander who took his place, an old
man with white hair, ordered the regiment to halt. "Damn you," he
cried to his men, "in the days of the Republic we waited till we were
forced by the enemy before running away. Defend every inch of ground,
and get yourselves killed!" he shouted, and swore at them. "It is the
soil of the Fatherland that these Prussians want to invade now!"

The little cart halted; Fabrizio awoke with a start. The sun had set
some time back; he was quite astonished to see that it was almost
night. The troops were running in all directions in a confusion which
greatly surprised our hero; they looked shame-faced, he thought.

"What is happening?" he asked the _cantinière_.

"Nothing at all. Only that we're in the soup, my boy; it's the
Prussian cavalry mowing us down, that's all. The idiot of a general
thought at first they were our men. Come, quick, help me to mend
Cocotte's trace; it's broken."

Several shots were fired ten yards off. Our hero, cool and composed,
said to himself: "But really, I haven't fought at all, the whole day;
I have only escorted a general.--I must go and fight," he said to the
_cantinière_.

"Keep calm, you shall fight, and more than you want! We're done for."

"Aubry, my lad," she called out to a passing corporal, "keep an eye on
the little cart now and then."

"Are you going to fight?" Fabrizio asked Aubry.

"Oh, no, I'm putting my pumps on to go to a dance!"

"I shall follow you."

"I tell you, he's all right, the little hussar," cried the
_cantinière_. "The young gentleman has a stout heart." Corporal
Aubry marched on without saying a word. Eight or nine soldiers ran up
and joined him; he led them behind a big oak surrounded by brambles.
On reaching it he posted them along the edge of the wood, still
without uttering a word, on a widely extended front, each man being at
least ten paces from the next.

"Now then, you men," said the corporal, opening his mouth for the
first time, "don't fire till I give the order: remember you've only
got three rounds each."

"Why, what is happening?" Fabrizio wondered. At length, when he found
himself alone with the corporal, he said to him : "I have no musket."

"Will you hold your tongue? Go forward there: fifty paces in front of
the wood you'll find one of the poor fellows of the Regiment who've
been sabred; you will take his cartridge-pouch and his musket. Don't
strip a wounded man, though; take the pouch and musket from one who's
properly dead, and hurry up or you'll be shot in the back by our
fellows." Fabrizio set off at a run and returned the next minute with
a musket and a pouch.

"Load your musket and stick yourself behind this tree, and whatever
you do don't fire till you get the order from me.... Great God in
heaven!" the corporal broke off, "he doesn't even know how to load!"
He helped Fabrizio to do this while going on with his instructions.
"If one of the enemy's cavalry gallops at you to cut you down, dodge
round your tree and don't fire till he's within three paces: wait till
your bayonet's practically touching his uniform.

"Throw that great sabre away," cried the corporal. "Good God, do you
want it to trip you up? Fine sort of soldiers they're sending us these
days!" As he spoke he himself took hold of the sabre which he flung
angrily away.

"You there, wipe the flint of your musket with your handkerchief.
Have you never fired a musket?"

"I am a hunter."

"Thank God for that!" went on the corporal with a loud sigh. "Whatever
you do, don't fire till I give the order." And he moved away.

Fabrizio was supremely happy. "Now I'm going to do some real
fighting," he said to himself, "and kill one of the enemy. This
morning they were sending cannonballs over, and I did nothing but
expose myself and risk getting killed; that's a fool's game." He gazed
all round him with extreme curiosity. Presently he heard seven or
eight shots fired quite close at hand. But receiving no order to fire
he stood quietly behind his tree. It was almost night; he felt he was
in a look-out, bear-shooting, on the mountain of Tramezzina, above
Grianta. A hunter's idea came to him: he took a cartridge from his
pouch and removed the ball. "If I see him," he said, "it won't do to
miss him," and he slipped this second ball into the barrel of his
musket. He heard shots fired close to his tree; at the same moment he
saw a horseman in blue pass in front of him at a gallop, going from
right to left. "It is more than three paces," he said to himself, "but
at that range I am certain of my mark." He kept the trooper carefully
sighted with his musket and finally pressed the trigger: the trooper
fell with his horse. Our hero imagined he was stalking game: he ran
joyfully out to collect his bag. He was actually touching the man, who
appeared to him to be dying, when, with incredible speed, two Prussian
troopers charged down on him to sabre him. Fabrizio dashed back as
fast as he could go to the wood; to gain speed he flung his musket
away. The Prussian troopers were not more than three paces from him
when he reached another plantation of young oaks, as thick as his arm
and quite upright, which fringed the wood. These little oaks delayed
the horsemen for a moment, but they passed them and continued their
pursuit of Fabrizio along a clearing. Once again they were just
overtaking him when he slipped in among seven or eight big trees. At
that moment his face was almost scorched by the flame of five or six
musket shots fired from in front of him. He ducked his head; when he
raised it again he found himself face to face with the corporal.

"Did you kill your man?" Corporal Aubry asked him.

"Yes; but I've lost my musket."

"It's not muskets we're short of. You're not a bad b------; though you
do look as green as a cabbage you've won the day all right, and these
men here have just missed the two who were chasing you and coming
straight at them. I didn't see them myself. What we've got to do now
is to get away at the double; the Regiment must be half a mile off,
and there's a bit of a field to cross, too, where we may find
ourselves surrounded."

As he spoke, the corporal marched off at a brisk pace at the head of
his ten men. Two hundred yards farther on, as they entered the little
field he had mentioned, they came upon a wounded general who was being
carried by his aide-de-camp and an orderly.

"Give me four of your men," he said to the corporal in a faint voice,
"I've got to be carried to the ambulance; my leg is shattered."

"Go and f---- yourself!" replied the corporal, "you and all your
generals. You've all of you betrayed the Emperor to-day."

"What," said the general, furious, "you dispute my orders. Do you
know that I am General Comte B----, commanding your Division," and so
on. He waxed rhetorical. The aide-de-camp flung himself on the men.
The corporal gave him a thrust in the arm with his bayonet, then made
off with his party at the double. "I wish they were all in your boat,"
he repeated with an oath; "I'd shatter their arms and legs for them. A
pack of puppies! All of them bought by the Bourbons, to betray the
Emperor!" Fabrizio listened with a thrill of horror to this frightful
accusation.

About ten o'clock that night the little party overtook their regiment
on the outskirts of a large village which divided the road into
several very narrow streets; but Fabrizio noticed that Corporal
Aubry avoided speaking to any of the officers. "We can't get on," he
called to his men. All these streets were blocked with infantry,
cavalry, and, worst of all, by the limbers and wagons of the
artillery. The corporal tried three of these streets in turn; after
advancing twenty yards he was obliged to halt. Everyone was swearing
and losing his temper.

"Some traitor in command here, too!" cried the corporal: "if the enemy
has the sense to surround the village, we shall all be caught like
rats in a trap. Follow me, you." Fabrizio looked round; there were
only six men left with the corporal. Through a big gate which stood
open they came into a huge courtyard; from this courtyard they passed
into a stable, the back door of which let them into a garden. They
lost their way for a moment and wandered blindly about. But finally,
going through a hedge, they found themselves in a huge field of
buckwheat. In less than half an hour, guided by the shouts and
confused noises, they had regained the high road on the other side of
the village. The ditches on either side of this road were filled with
muskets that had been thrown away; Fabrizio selected one: but the
road, although very broad, was so blocked with stragglers and
transport that in the next half-hour the corporal and Fabrizio had not
advanced more than five hundred yards at the most; they were told that
this road led to Charleroi. As the village clock struck eleven:

"Let us cut across the fields again," said the corporal. The little
party was reduced now to three men, the corporal and Fabrizio. When
they had gone a quarter of a league from the high road: "I'm done,"
said one of the soldiers.

"Me, too!" said another.

"That's good news! We're all in the same boat," said the corporal;
"but do what I tell you and you'll get through all right." His eye
fell on five or six trees marking the line of a little ditch in the
middle of an immense cornfield. "Make for the trees!" he told his men;
"lie down," he added when they had reached the trees, "and not a
sound, remember. But before you go to sleep, who's got any bread?"

"I have," said one of the men.

"Give it here," said the corporal in a tone of authority. He divided
the bread into five pieces and took the smallest himself.

"A quarter of an hour before dawn," he said as he ate it, "you'll have
the enemy's cavalry on your backs. You've got to see you're not
sabred. A man by himself is done for with cavalry after him on these
big plains, but five can get away; keep in close touch with me, don't
fire till they're at close range, and to-morrow evening I'll undertake
to get you to Charleroi." The corporal roused his men an hour before
daybreak and made them recharge their muskets. The noise on the high
road still continued; it had gone on all night: it was like the sound
of a torrent heard from a long way off.

"They're like a flock of sheep running away," said Fabrizio with a
guileless air to the corporal.

"Will you shut your mouth, you young fool!" said the corporal, greatly
indignant. And the three soldiers who with Fabrizio composed his whole
force scowled angrily at our hero as though he had uttered blasphemy.
He had insulted the nation.

"That is where their strength lies!" thought our hero. "I noticed it
before with the Viceroy at Milan; they are not running away, oh, no!
With these Frenchmen you must never speak the truth if it shocks their
vanity. But as for their savage scowls, they don't trouble me, and I
must let them understand as much." They kept on their way, always at
an interval of five hundred yards from the torrent of fugitives that
covered the high road. A league farther on, the corporal and his party
crossed a road running into the high road in which a number of
soldiers were lying. Fabrizio purchased a fairly good horse which cost
him forty francs, and among all the sabres that had been thrown down
everywhere made a careful choice of one that was long and straight.
"Since I'm told I've got to stick them," he thought, "this is the
best." Thus equipped, he put his horse into a gallop and soon overtook
the corporal who had gone on ahead. He sat up in his stirrups, took
hold with his left hand of the scabbard of his straight sabre, and
said to the four Frenchmen:

"Those people going along the high road look like a flock of sheep ...
they are running like frightened sheep. ..."

In spite of his dwelling upon the word _sheep_, his companions had
completely forgotten that it had annoyed them an hour earlier. Here we
see one of the contrasts between the Italian character and the French;
the Frenchman is no doubt the happier of the two; he glides lightly
over the events of life and bears no malice afterwards.

We shall not attempt to conceal the fact that Fabrizio was highly
pleased with himself after using the word _sheep_. They marched on,
talking about nothing in particular. After covering two leagues
more, the corporal, still greatly astonished to see no sign of the
enemy's cavalry, said to Fabrizio:

"You are our cavalry; gallop over to that farm on the little hill; ask
the farmer if he will _sell_ us breakfast: mind you tell him there are
only five of us. If he hesitates, put down five francs of your money
in advance; but don't be frightened, we'll take the dollar back from
him after we've eaten."

Fabrizio looked at the corporal; he saw in his face an imperturbable
gravity and really an air of moral superiority; he obeyed. Everything
fell out as the commander in chief had anticipated; only, Fabrizio
insisted on their not taking back by force the five francs he had
given to the farmer.

"The money is mine," he said to his friends; "I'm not paying for you,
I'm paying for the oats he's given my horse."

Fabrizio's French accent was so bad that his companions thought they
detected in his words a note of superiority; they were keenly annoyed,
and from that moment a duel began to take shape in their minds for the
end of the day. They found him very different from themselves, which
shocked them; Fabrizio, on the contrary, was beginning to feel a warm
friendship towards them.

They had marched without saying a word for a couple of hours when the
corporal, looking across at the high road, exclaimed in a transport of
joy: "There's the Regiment!" They were soon on the road; but, alas,
round the eagle were mustered not more than two hundred men.
Fabrizio's eye soon caught sight of the _vivandière_: she was going on
foot, her eyes were red and every now and again she burst into tears.
Fabrizio looked in vain for the little cart and Cocotte.

"Stripped, ruined, robbed!" cried the _vivandière_, in answer to our
hero's inquiring glance. He, without a word, got down from his horse,
took hold of the bridle and said to the _vivandière_: "Mount!" She did
not have to be told twice.

"Shorten the stirrups for me," was her onl