Farewell
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Honore de Balzac >> Farewell
"How about the sentinels, major?"
"One of us three--" he began; then he turned from the soldier and
looked at the aide-de-camp.--"You are coming, aren't you, Hippolyte?"
Hippolyte nodded assent.
"One of us," the major went on, "will look after the sentry. Besides,
perhaps those blessed Russians are also fast asleep."
"All right, major; you are a good sort! But will you take me in your
carriage?" asked the grenadier.
"Yes, if you don't leave your bones up yonder.-- If I come to grief,
promise me, you two, that you will do everything in your power to save
the Countess."
"All right," said the grenadier.
They set out for the Russian lines, taking the direction of the
batteries that had so cruelly raked the mass of miserable creatures
huddled together by the river bank. A few minutes later the hoofs of
two galloping horses rang on the frozen snow, and the awakened battery
fired a volley that passed over the heads of the sleepers; the
hoof-beats rattled so fast on the iron ground that they sounded like
the hammering in a smithy. The generous aide-de-camp had fallen; the
stalwart grenadier had come off safe and sound; and Philip himself
received a bayonet thrust in the shoulder while defending his friend.
Notwithstanding his wound, he clung to his horse's mane, and gripped
him with his knees so tightly that the animal was held as in a vise.
"God be praised!" cried the major, when he saw his soldier still on
the spot, and the carriage standing where he had left it.
"If you do the right thing by me, sir, you will get me the cross for
this. We have treated them to a sword dance to a pretty tune from the
rifle, eh?"
"We have done nothing yet! Let us put the horses in. Take hold of
these cords."
"They are not long enough."
"All right, grenadier, just go and overhaul those fellows sleeping
there; take their shawls, sheets, anything--"
"I say! the rascal is dead," cried the grenadier, as he plundered the
first man who came to hand. "Why, they are all dead! how queer!"
"All of them?"
"Yes, every one. It looks as though the horseflesh /a la neige/ was
indigestible."
Philip shuddered at the words. The night had grown twice as cold as
before.
"Great heaven! to lose her when I have saved her life a score of times
already."
He shook the Countess, "Stephanie! Stephanie!" he cried.
She opened her eyes.
"We are saved, madame!"
"Saved!" she echoed, and fell back again.
The horses were harnessed after a fashion at last. The major held his
sabre in his unwounded hand, took the reins in the other, saw to his
pistols, and sprang on one of the horses, while the grenadier mounted
the other. The old sentinel had been pushed into the carriage, and lay
across the knees of the general and the Countess; his feet were
frozen. Urged on by blows from the flat of the sabre, the horses
dragged the carriage at a mad gallop down to the plain, where endless
difficulties awaited them. Before long it became almost impossible to
advance without crushing sleeping men, women, and even children at
every step, all of whom declined to stir when the grenadier awakened
them. In vain M. de Sucy looked for the track that the rearguard had
cut through this dense crowd of human beings; there was no more sign
of their passage than the wake of a ship in the sea. The horses could
only move at a foot-pace, and were stopped most frequently by
soldiers, who threatened to kill them.
"Do you mean to get there?" asked the grenadier.
"Yes, if it costs every drop of blood in my body! if it costs the
whole world!" the major answered.
"Forward, then! . . . You can't have the omelette without breaking
eggs." And the grenadier of the Garde urged on the horses over the
prostrate bodies, and upset the bivouacs; the blood-stained wheels
ploughing that field of faces left a double furrow of dead. But in
justice it should be said that he never ceased to thunder out his
warning cry, "Carrion! look out!"
"Poor wretches!" exclaimed the major.
"Bah! That way, or the cold, or the cannon!" said the grenadier,
goading on the horses with the point of his sword.
Then came the catastrophe, which must have happened sooner but for
miraculous good fortune; the carriage was overturned, and all further
progress was stopped at once.
"I expected as much!" exclaimed the imperturbable grenadier. "Oho! he
is dead!" he added, looking at his comrade.
"Poor Laurent!" said the major.
"Laurent! Wasn't he in the Fifth Chasseurs?"
"Yes."
"My own cousin.-- Pshaw! this beastly life is not so pleasant that one
need be sorry for him as things go."
But all this time the carriage lay overturned, and the horses were
only released after great and irreparable loss of time. The shock had
been so violent that the Countess had been awakened by it, and the
subsequent commotion aroused her from her stupor. She shook off the
rugs and rose.
"Where are we, Philip?" she asked in musical tones, as she looked
about her.
"About five hundred paces from the bridge. We are just about to cross
the Beresina. When we are on the other side, Stephanie, I will not
tease you any more; I will let you go to sleep; we shall be in safety,
we can go on to Wilna in peace. God grant that you may never know what
your life has cost!"
"You are wounded!"
"A mere trifle."
The hour of doom had come. The Russian cannon announced the day. The
Russians were in possession of Studzianka, and thence were raking the
plain with grapeshot; and by the first dim light of the dawn the major
saw two columns moving and forming above the heights. Then a cry of
horror went up from the crowd, and in a moment every one sprang to his
feet. Each instinctively felt his danger, and all made a rush for the
bridge, surging towards it like a wave.
Then the Russians came down upon them, swift as a conflagration. Men,
women, children, and horses all crowded towards the river. Luckily for
the major and the Countess, they were still at some distance from the
bank. General Eble had just set fire to the bridge on the other side;
but in spite of all the warnings given to those who rushed towards the
chance of salvation, not one among them could or would draw back. The
overladen bridge gave way, and not only so, the impetus of the frantic
living wave towards that fatal bank was such that a dense crowd of
human beings was thrust into the water as if by an avalanche. The
sound of a single human cry could not be distinguished; there was a
dull crash as if an enormous stone had fallen into the water--and the
Beresina was covered with corpses.
The violent recoil of those in front, striving to escape this death,
brought them into hideous collision with those behind then, who were
pressing towards the bank, and many were suffocated and crushed. The
Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to the carriage. The
horses that had trampled and crushed so many dying men were crushed
and trampled to death in their turn by the human maelstrom which
eddied from the bank. Sheer physical strength saved the major and the
grenadier. They killed others in self-defence. That wild sea of human
faces and living bodies, surging to and fro as by one impulse, left
the bank of the Beresina clear for a few moments. The multitude had
hurled themselves back on the plain. Some few men sprang down from the
banks of the river, not so much with any hope of reaching the opposite
shore, which for them meant France, as from dread of the wastes of
Siberia. For some bold spirits despair became a panoply. An officer
leaped from hummock to hummock of ice, and reached the other shore;
one of the soldiers scrambled over miraculously on the piles of dead
bodies and drift ice. But the immense multitude left behind saw at
last that the Russians would not slaughter twenty thousand unarmed
men, too numb with the cold to attempt to resist them, and each
awaited his fate with dreadful apathy. By this time the major and his
grenadier, the old general and his wife, were left to themselves not
very far from the place where the bridge had been. All four stood dry-
eyed and silent among the heaps of dead. A few able-bodied men and one
or two officers, who had recovered all their energy at this crisis,
gathered about them. The group was sufficiently large; there were
about fifty men all told. A couple of hundred paces from them stood
the wreck of the artillery bridge, which had broken down the day
before; the major saw this, and "Let us make a raft!" he cried.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth before the whole group
hurried to the ruins of the bridge. A crowd of men began to pick up
iron clamps and to hunt for planks and ropes--for all the materials
for a raft, in short. A score of armed men and officers, under command
of the major, stood on guard to protect the workers from any desperate
attempt on the part of the multitude if they should guess their
design. The longing for freedom, which inspires prisoners to
accomplish impossibilities, cannot be compared with the hope which
lent energy at that moment to these forlorn Frenchmen.
"The Russians are upon us! Here are the Russians!" the guard shouted
to the workers.
The timbers creaked, the raft grew larger, stronger, and more
substantial. Generals, colonels, and common soldiers all alike bent
beneath the weight of wagon-wheels, chains, coils of rope, and planks
of timber; it was a modern realization of the building of Noah's ark.
The young Countess, sitting by her husband's side, looked on,
regretful that she could do nothing to aide the workers, though she
helped to knot the lengths of rope together.
At last the raft was finished. Forty men launched it out into the
river, while ten of the soldiers held the ropes that must keep it
moored to the shore. The moment that they saw their handiwork floating
on the Beresina, they sprang down onto it from the bank with callous
selfishness. The major, dreading the frenzy of the first rush, held
back Stephanie and the general; but a shudder ran through him when he
saw the landing place black with people, and men crowding down like
playgoers into the pit of a theatre.
"It was I who thought of the raft, you savages!" he cried. "I have
saved your lives, and you will not make room for me!"
A confused murmur was the only answer. The men at the edge took up
stout poles, trust them against the bank with all their might, so as
to shove the raft out and gain an impetus at its starting upon a
journey across a sea of floating ice and dead bodies towards the other
shore.
"/Tonnerre de Dieu/! I will knock some of you off into the water if
you don't make room for the major and his two companions," shouted the
grenadier. He raised his sabre threateningly, delayed the departure,
and made the men stand closer together, in spite of threatening yells.
"I shall fall in! . . . I shall go overboard! . . ." his fellows
shouted.
"Let us start! Put off!"
The major gazed with tearless eyes at the woman he loved; an impulse
of sublime resignation raised her eyes to heaven.
"To die with you!" she said.
In the situation of the folk upon the raft there was a certain comic
element. They might utter hideous yells, but not one of them dared to
oppose the grenadier, for they were packed together so tightly that if
one man were knocked down, the whole raft might capsize. At this
delicate crisis, a captain tried to rid himself of one of his
neighbors; the man saw the hostile intention of his officer, collared
him, and pitched him overboard. "Aha! The duck has a mind to drink.
. . . Over with you!-- There is room for two now!" he shouted. "Quick,
major! throw your little woman over, and come! Never mind that old
dotard! he will drop off to-morrow!"
"Be quick!" cried a voice, made up of a hundred voices.
"Come, major! Those fellows are making a fuss, and well they may."
The Comte de Vandieres flung off his ragged blankets, and stood before
them in his general's uniform.
"Let us save the Count," said Philip.
Stephanie grasped his hand tightly in hers, flung her arms about, and
clasped him close in an agonized embrace.
"Farewell!" she said.
Then each knew the other's thoughts. The Comte de Vandieres recovered
his energies and presence of mind sufficiently to jump on to the raft,
whither Stephanie followed him after one last look at Philip.
"Major, won't you take my place? I do not care a straw for life; I
have neither a wife, nor child, nor mother belonging to me--"
"I give them into your charge," cried the major, indicating the Count
and his wife.
"Be easy; I will take as much care of them as of the apple of my eye."
Philip stood stock-still on the bank. The raft sped so violently
towards the opposite shore that it ran aground with a violent shock to
all on board. The Count, standing on the very edge, was shaken into
the stream; and as he fell, a mass of ice swept by and struck off his
head, and sent it flying like a ball.
"Hey! major!" shouted the grenadier.
"Farewell!" a woman's voice called aloud.
An icy shiver ran through Philip de Sucy, and he dropped down where he
stood, overcome with cold and sorrow and weariness.
"My poor niece went out of her mind," the doctor added after a brief
pause. "Ah! monsieur," he went on, grasping M. d'Albon's hand, "what a
fearful life for a poor little thing, so young, so delicate! An
unheard-of misfortune separated her from that grenadier of the Garde
(Fleuriot by name), and for two years she was dragged on after the
army, the laughing-stock of a rabble of outcasts. She went barefoot, I
heard, ill-clad, neglected, and starved for months at a time;
sometimes confined to a hospital, sometimes living like a hunted
animal. God alone knows all the misery which she endured, and yet she
lives. She was shut up in a madhouse in a little German town, while
her relations, believing her to be dead, were dividing her property
here in France.
"In 1816 the grenadier Fleuriot recognized her in an inn in
Strasbourg. She had just managed to escape from captivity. Some
peasants told him that the Countess had lived for a whole month in a
forest, and how that they had tracked her and tried to catch her
without success.
"I was at that time not many leagues from Strasbourg; and hearing the
talk about the girl in the wood, I wished to verify the strange facts
that had given rise to absurd stories. What was my feeling when I
beheld the Countess? Fleuriot told me all that he knew of the piteous
story. I took the poor fellow with my niece into Auvergne, and there I
had the misfortune to lose him. He had some ascendancy over Mme. de
Vandieres. He alone succeeded in persuading her to wear clothes; and
in those days her one word of human speech--/Farewell/--she seldom
uttered. Fleuriot set himself to the task of awakening certain
associations; but there he failed completely; he drew that one
sorrowful word from her a little more frequently, that was all. But
the old grenadier could amuse her, and devoted himself to playing with
her, and through him I hoped; but--" here Stephanie's uncle broke off.
After a moment he went on again.
"Here she has found another creature with whom she seems to have an
understanding--an idiot peasant girl, who once, in spite of her
plainness and imbecility, fell in love with a mason. The mason thought
of marrying her because she had a little bit of land, and for a whole
year poor Genevieve was the happiest of living creatures. She dressed
in her best, and danced on Sundays with Dallot; she understood love;
there was room for love in her heart and brain. But Dallot thought
better of it. He found another girl who had all her senses and rather
more land than Genevieve, and he forsook Genevieve for her. Then the
poor thing lost the little intelligence that love had developed in
her; she can do nothing now but cut grass and look after the cattle.
My niece and the poor girl are in some sort bound to each other by the
invisible chain of their common destiny, and by their madness due to
the same cause. Just come here a moment; look!" and Stephanie's uncle
led the Marquis d'Albon to the window.
There, in fact, the magistrate beheld the pretty Countess sitting on
the ground at Genevieve's knee, while the peasant girl was wholly
absorbed in combing out Stephanie's long, black hair with a huge comb.
The Countess submitted herself to this, uttering low smothered cries
that expressed her enjoyment of the sensation of physical comfort. A
shudder ran through M. d'Albon as he saw her attitude of languid
abandonment, the animal supineness that revealed an utter lack of
intelligence.
"Oh! Philip, Philip!" he cried, "past troubles are as nothing. Is it
quite hopeless?" he asked.
The doctor raised his eyes to heaven.
"Good-bye, monsieur," said M. d'Albon, pressing the old man's hand.
"My friend is expecting me; you will see him here before long."
"Then it is Stephanie herself?" cried Sucy when the Marquis had spoken
the first few words. "Ah! until now I did not feel sure!" he added.
Tears filled the dark eyes that were wont to wear a stern expression.
"Yes; she is the Comtesse de Vandieres," his friend replied.
The colonel started up, and hurriedly began to dress.
"Why, Philip!" cried the horrified magistrate. "Are you going mad?"
"I am quite well now," said the colonel simply. "This news has soothed
all my bitterest grief; what pain could hurt me while I think of
Stephanie? I am going over to the Minorite convent, to see her and
speak to her, to restore her to health again. She is free; ah, surely,
surely, happiness will smile on us, or there is no Providence above.
How can you think she could hear my voice, poor Stephanie, and not
recover her reason?"
"She has seen you once already, and she did not recognize you," the
magistrate answered gently, trying to suggest some wholesome fears to
this friend, whose hopes were visibly too high.
The colonel shuddered, but he began to smile again, with a slight
involuntary gesture of incredulity. Nobody ventured to oppose his
plans, and a few hours later he had taken up his abode in the old
priory, to be near the doctor and the Comtesse de Vandieres.
"Where is she?" he cried at once.
"Hush!" answered M. Fanjat, Stephanie's uncle. "She is sleeping. Stay;
here she is."
Philip saw the poor distraught sleeper crouching on a stone bench in
the sun. Her thick hair, straggling over her face, screened it from
the glare and heat; her arms dropped languidly to the earth; she lay
at ease as gracefully as a fawn, her feet tucked up beneath her; her
bosom rose and fell with her even breathing; there was the same
transparent whiteness as of porcelain in her skin and complexion that
we so often admire in children's faces. Genevieve sat there
motionless, holding a spray that Stephanie doubtless had brought down
from the top of one of the tallest poplars; the idiot girl was waving
the green branch above her, driving away the flies from her sleeping
companion, and gently fanning her.
She stared at M. Fanjat and the colonel as they came up; then, like a
dumb animal that recognizes its master, she slowly turned her face
towards the countess, and watched over her as before, showing not the
slightest sign of intelligence or of astonishment. The air was
scorching. The glittering particles of the stone bench shone like
sparks of fire; the meadow sent up the quivering vapors that hover
above the grass and gleam like golden dust when they catch the light,
but Genevieve did not seem to feel the raging heat.
The colonel wrung M. Fanjat's hands; the tears that gathered in the
soldier's eyes stole down his cheeks, and fell on the grass at
Stephanie's feet.
"Sir," said her uncle, "for these two years my heart has been broken
daily. Before very long you will be as I am; if you do not weep, you
will not feel your anguish the less."
"You have taken care of her!" said the colonel, and jealousy no less
than gratitude could be read in his eyes.
The two men understood one another. They grasped each other by the
hand again, and stood motionless, gazing in admiration at the serenity
that slumber had brought into the lovely face before them. Stephanie
heaved a sigh from time to time, and this sigh, that had all the
appearance of sensibility, made the unhappy colonel tremble with
gladness.
"Alas!" M. Fanjat said gently, "do not deceive yourself, monsieur; as
you see her now, she is in full possession of such reason as she has."
Those who have sat for whole hours absorbed in the delight of watching
over the slumber of some tenderly-beloved one, whose waking eyes will
smile for them, will doubtless understand the bliss and anguish that
shook the colonel. For him this slumber was an illusion, the waking
must be a kind of death, the most dreadful of all deaths.
Suddenly a kid frisked in two or three bounds towards the bench and
snuffed at Stephanie. The sound awakened her; she sprang lightly to
her feet without scaring away the capricious creature; but as soon as
she saw Philip she fled, followed by her four-footed playmate, to a
thicket of elder-trees; then she uttered a little cry like the note of
a startled wild bird, the same sound that the colonel had heard once
before near the grating, when the Countess appeared to M. d'Albon for
the first time. At length she climbed into a laburnum-tree, ensconced
herself in the feathery greenery, and peered out at the /strange man/
with as much interest as the most inquisitive nightingale in the
forest.
"Farewell, farewell, farewell," she said, but the soul sent no trace
of expression of feeling through the words, spoken with the careless
intonation of a bird's notes.
"She does not know me!" the colonel exclaimed in despair. "Stephanie!
Here is Philip, your Philip! . . . Philip!" and the poor soldier went
towards the laburnum-tree; but when he stood three paces away, the
Countess eyed him almost defiantly, though there was timidity in her
eyes; then at a bound she sprang from the laburnum to an acacia, and
thence to a spruce-fir, swinging from bough to bough with marvelous
dexterity.
"Do not follow her," said M. Fanjat, addressing the colonel. "You
would arouse a feeling of aversion in her which might become
insurmountable; I will help you to make her acquaintance and to tame
her. Sit down on the bench. If you pay no heed whatever to her, poor
child, it will not be long before you will see her come nearer by
degrees to look at you."
"That /she/ should not know me; that she should fly from me!" the
colonel repeated, sitting down on a rustic bench and leaning his back
against a tree that overshadowed it.
He bowed his head. The doctor remained silent. Before very long the
Countess stole softly down from her high refuge in the spruce-fir,
flitting like a will-o'-the-wisp; for as the wind stirred the boughs,
she lent herself at times to the swaying movements of the trees. At
each branch she stopped and peered at the stranger; but as she saw him
sitting motionless, she at length jumped down to the grass, stood a
while, and came slowly across the meadow. When she took up her
position by a tree about ten paces from the bench, M. Fanjat spoke to
the colonel in a low voice.
"Feel in my pocket for some lumps of sugar," he said, "and let her see
them, she will come; I willingly give up to you the pleasure of giving
her sweetmeats. She is passionately fond of sugar, and by that means
you will accustom her to come to you and to know you."
"She never cared for sweet things when she was a woman," Philip
answered sadly.
When he held out the lump of sugar between his thumb and finger, and
shook it, Stephanie uttered the wild note again, and sprang quickly
towards him; then she stopped short, there was a conflict between
longing for the sweet morsel and instinctive fear of him; she looked
at the sugar, turned her head away, and looked again like an
unfortunate dog forbidden to touch some scrap of food, while his
master slowly recites the greater part of the alphabet until he
reaches the letter that gives permission. At length the animal
appetite conquered fear; Stephanie rushed to Philip, held out a dainty
brown hand to pounce upon the coveted morsel, touched her lover's
fingers, snatched the piece of sugar, and vanished with it into a
thicket. This painful scene was too much for the colonel; he burst
into tears, and took refuge in the drawing-room.
"Then has love less courage than affection?" M. Fanjat asked him. "I
have hope, Monsieur le Baron. My poor niece was once in a far more
pitiable state than at present."
"Is it possible?" cried Philip.
"She would not wear clothes," answered the doctor.
The colonel shuddered, and his face grew pale. To the doctor's mind
this pallor was an unhealthy symptom; he went over to him and felt his
pulse. M. de Sucy was in a high fever; by dint of persuasion, he
succeeded in putting the patient in bed, and gave him a few drops of
laudanum to gain repose and sleep.
The Baron de Sucy spent nearly a week, in a constant struggle with a
deadly anguish, and before long he had no tears left to shed. He was
often well-nigh heartbroken; he could not grow accustomed to the sight
of the Countess' madness; but he made terms for himself, as it were,
in this cruel position, and sought alleviations in his pain. His
heroism was boundless. He found courage to overcome Stephanie's wild
shyness by choosing sweetmeats for her, and devoted all his thoughts
to this, bringing these dainties, and following up the little
victories that he set himself to gain over Stephanie's instincts (the
last gleam of intelligence in her), until he succeeded to some extent
--she grew /tamer/ than ever before. Every morning the colonel went
into the park; and if, after a long search for the Countess, he could
not discover the tree in which she was rocking herself gently, nor the
nook where she lay crouching at play with some bird, nor the roof
where she had perched herself, he would whistle the well-known air
/Partant pour la Syrie/, which recalled old memories of their love,
and Stephanie would run towards him lightly as a fawn. She saw the
colonel so often that she was no longer afraid of him; before very
long she would sit on his knee with her thin, lithe arms about him.
And while thus they sat as lovers love to do, Philip doled out
sweetmeats one by one to the eager Countess. When they were all
finished, the fancy often took Stephanie to search through her lover's
pockets with a monkey's quick instinctive dexterity, till she had
assured herself that there was nothing left, and then she gazed at
Philip with vacant eyes; there was no thought, no gratitude in their
clear depths. Then she would play with him. She tried to take off his
boots to see his foot; she tore his gloves to shreds, and put on his
hat; and she would let him pass his hands through her hair, and take
her in his arms, and submit passively to his passionate kisses, and at
last, if he shed tears, she would gaze silently at him.