Works of Honore De Balzac, page 265
“Are you making mamma cry?” said Jules, looking fiercely at the Colonel.
“Silence, Jules!” said the mother in a decided tone.
The two children stood speechless, examining their mother and the stranger with a curiosity which it is impossible to express in words.
“Oh yes!” she cried. “If I am separated from the Count, only leave me my children, and I will submit to anything...”
This was the decisive speech which gained all that she had hoped from it.
“Yes,” exclaimed the Colonel, as if he were ending a sentence already begun in his mind, “I must return underground again. I had told myself so already.”
“Can I accept such a sacrifice?” replied his wife. “If some men have died to save a mistress’ honor, they gave their life but once. But in this case you would be giving your life every day. No, no. It is impossible. If it were only your life, it would be nothing; but to sign a declaration that you are not Colonel Chabert, to acknowledge yourself an imposter, to sacrifice your honor, and live a lie every hour of the day! Human devotion cannot go so far. Only think! — No. But for my poor children I would have fled with you by this time to the other end of the world.”
“But,” said Chabert, “cannot I live here in your little lodge as one of your relations? I am as worn out as a cracked cannon; I want nothing but a little tobacco and the Constitutionnel.”
The Countess melted into tears. There was a contest of generosity between the Comtesse Ferraud and Colonel Chabert, and the soldier came out victorious. One evening, seeing this mother with her children, the soldier was bewitched by the touching grace of a family picture in the country, in the shade and the silence; he made a resolution to remain dead, and, frightened no longer at the authentication of a deed, he asked what he could do to secure beyond all risk the happiness of this family.
“Do exactly as you like,” said the Countess. “I declare to you that I will have nothing to do with this affair. I ought not.”
Delbecq had arrived some days before, and in obedience to the Countess’ verbal instructions, the intendant had succeeded in gaining the old soldier’s confidence. So on the following morning Colonel Chabert went with the erewhile attorney to Saint-Leu-Taverny, where Delbecq had caused the notary to draw up an affidavit in such terms that, after hearing it read, the Colonel started up and walked out of the office.
“Turf and thunder! What a fool you must think me! Why, I should make myself out a swindler!” he exclaimed.
“Indeed, monsieur,” said Delbecq, “I should advise you not to sign in haste. In your place I would get at least thirty thousand francs a year out of the bargain. Madame would pay them.”
After annihilating this scoundrel emeritus by the lightning look of an honest man insulted, the Colonel rushed off, carried away by a thousand contrary emotions. He was suspicious, indignant, and calm again by turns.
Finally he made his way back into the park of Groslay by a gap in a fence, and slowly walked on to sit down and rest, and meditate at his ease, in a little room under a gazebo, from which the road to Saint-Leu could be seen. The path being strewn with the yellowish sand which is used instead of river-gravel, the Countess, who was sitting in the upper room of this little summer-house, did not hear the Colonel’s approach, for she was too much preoccupied with the success of her business to pay the smallest attention to the slight noise made by her husband. Nor did the old man notice that his wife was in the room over him.
“Well, Monsieur Delbecq, has he signed?” the Countess asked her secretary, whom she saw alone on the road beyond the hedge of a haha.
“No, madame. I do not even know what has become of our man. The old horse reared.”
“Then we shall be obliged to put him into Charenton,” said she, “since we have got him.”
The Colonel, who recovered the elasticity of youth to leap the haha, in the twinkling of an eye was standing in front of Delbecq, on whom he bestowed the two finest slaps that ever a scoundrel’s cheeks received.
“And you may add that old horses can kick!” said he.
His rage spent, the Colonel no longer felt vigorous enough to leap the ditch. He had seen the truth in all its nakedness. The Countess’ speech and Delbecq’s reply had revealed the conspiracy of which he was to be the victim. The care taken of him was but a bait to entrap him in a snare. That speech was like a drop of subtle poison, bringing on in the old soldier a return of all his sufferings, physical and moral. He came back to the summer-house through the park gate, walking slowly like a broken man.
Then for him there was to be neither peace nor truce. From this moment he must begin the odious warfare with this woman of which Derville had spoken, enter on a life of litigation, feed on gall, drink every morning of the cup of bitterness. And then — fearful thought! — where was he to find the money needful to pay the cost of the first proceedings? He felt such disgust of life, that if there had been any water at hand he would have thrown himself into it; that if he had had a pistol, he would have blown out his brains. Then he relapsed into the indecision of mind which, since his conversation with Derville at the dairyman’s had changed his character.
At last, having reached the kiosque, he went up to the gazebo, where little rose-windows afforded a view over each lovely landscape of the valley, and where he found his wife seated on a chair. The Countess was gazing at the distance, and preserved a calm countenance, showing that impenetrable face which women can assume when resolved to do their worst. She wiped her eyes as if she had been weeping, and played absently with the pink ribbons of her sash. Nevertheless, in spite of her apparent assurance, she could not help shuddering slightly when she saw before her her venerable benefactor, standing with folded arms, his face pale, his brow stern.
“Madame,” he said, after gazing at her fixedly for a moment and compelling her to blush, “Madame, I do not curse you — I scorn you. I can now thank the chance that has divided us. I do not feel even a desire for revenge; I no longer love you. I want nothing from you. Live in peace on the strength of my word; it is worth more than the scrawl of all the notaries in Paris. I will never assert my claim to the name I perhaps have made illustrious. I am henceforth but a poor devil named Hyacinthe, who asks no more than his share of the sunshine. — Farewell!”
The Countess threw herself at his feet; she would have detained him by taking his hands, but he pushed her away with disgust, saying:
“Do not touch me!”
The Countess’ expression when she heard her husband’s retreating steps is quite indescribable. Then, with the deep perspicacity given only by utter villainy, or by fierce worldly selfishness, she knew that she might live in peace on the word and the contempt of this loyal veteran.
Chabert, in fact, disappeared. The dairyman failed in business, and became a hackney-cab driver. The Colonel, perhaps, took up some similar industry for a time. Perhaps, like a stone flung into a chasm, he went falling from ledge to ledge, to be lost in the mire of rags that seethes through the streets of Paris.
Six months after this event, Derville, hearing no more of Colonel Chabert or the Comtesse Ferraud, supposed that they had no doubt come to a compromise, which the Countess, out of revenge, had had arranged by some other lawyer. So one morning he added up the sums he had advanced to the said Chabert with the costs, and begged the Comtesse Ferraud to claim from M. le Comte Chabert the amount of the bill, assuming that she would know where to find her first husband.
The very next day Comte Ferraud’s man of business, lately appointed President of the County Court in a town of some importance, wrote this distressing note to Derville:
“MONSIEUR, —
“Madame la Comtesse Ferraud desires me to inform you that your
client took complete advantage of your confidence, and that the
individual calling himself Comte Chabert has acknowledged that he
came forward under false pretences.
“Yours, etc., DELBECQ.”
“One comes across people who are, on my honor, too stupid by half,” cried Derville. “They don’t deserve to be Christians! Be humane, generous, philanthropical, and a lawyer, and you are bound to be cheated! There is a piece of business that will cost me two thousand-franc notes!”
Some time after receiving this letter, Derville went to the Palais de Justice in search of a pleader to whom he wished to speak, and who was employed in the Police Court. As chance would have it, Derville went into Court Number 6 at the moment when the Presiding Magistrate was sentencing one Hyacinthe to two months’ imprisonment as a vagabond, and subsequently to be taken to the Mendicity House of Detention, a sentence which, by magistrates’ law, is equivalent to perpetual imprisonment. On hearing the name of Hyacinthe, Derville looked at the deliquent, sitting between two gendarmes on the bench for the accused, and recognized in the condemned man his false Colonel Chabert.
The old soldier was placid, motionless, almost absentminded. In spite of his rags, in spite of the misery stamped on his countenance, it gave evidence of noble pride. His eye had a stoical expression which no magistrate ought to have misunderstood; but as soon as a man has fallen into the hands of justice, he is no more than a moral entity, a matter of law or of fact, just as to statists he has become a zero.
When the veteran was taken back to the lock-up, to be removed later with the batch of vagabonds at that moment at the bar, Derville availed himself of the privilege accorded to lawyers of going wherever they please in the Courts, and followed him to the lock-up, where he stood scrutinizing him for some minutes, as well as the curious crew of beggars among whom he found himself. The passage to the lock-up at that moment afforded one of those spectacles which, unfortunately, neither legislators, nor philanthropists, nor painters, nor writers come to study. Like all the laboratories of the law, this ante-room is a dark and malodorous place; along the walls runs a wooden seat, blackened by the constant presence there of the wretches who come to this meeting-place of every form of social squalor, where not one of them is missing.
A poet might say that the day was ashamed to light up this dreadful sewer through which so much misery flows! There is not a spot on that plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides complained of by hypocritical writers who are incapable of taking a step to prevent them — for that justification is written in that ante-room, like a preface to the dramas of the Morgue, or to those enacted on the Place de la Greve.
At this moment Colonel Chabert was sitting among these men — men with coarse faces, clothed in the horrible livery of misery, and silent at intervals, or talking in a low tone, for three gendarmes on duty paced to and fro, their sabres clattering on the floor.
“Do you recognize me?” said Derville to the old man, standing in front of him.
“Yes, sir,” said Chabert, rising.
“If you are an honest man,” Derville went on in an undertone, “how could you remain in my debt?”
The old soldier blushed as a young girl might when accused by her mother of a clandestine love affair.
“What! Madame Ferraud has not paid you?” cried he in a loud voice.
“Paid me?” said Derville. “She wrote to me that you were a swindler.”
The Colonel cast up his eyes in a sublime impulse of horror and imprecation, as if to call heaven to witness to this fresh subterfuge.
“Monsieur,” said he, in a voice that was calm by sheer huskiness, “get the gendarmes to allow me to go into the lock-up, and I will sign an order which will certainly be honored.”
At a word from Derville to the sergeant he was allowed to take his client into the room, where Hyacinthe wrote a few lines, and addressed them to the Comtesse Ferraud.
“Send her that,” said the soldier, “and you will be paid your costs and the money you advanced. Believe me, monsieur, if I have not shown you the gratitude I owe you for your kind offices, it is not the less there,” and he laid his hand on his heart. “Yes, it is there, deep and sincere. But what can the unfortunate do? They live, and that is all.”
“What!” said Derville. “Did you not stipulate for an allowance?”
“Do not speak of it!” cried the old man. “You cannot conceive how deep my contempt is for the outside life to which most men cling. I was suddenly attacked by a sickness — disgust of humanity. When I think that Napoleon is at Saint-Helena, everything on earth is a matter of indifference to me. I can no longer be a soldier; that is my only real grief. After all,” he added with a gesture of childish simplicity, “it is better to enjoy luxury of feeling than of dress. For my part, I fear nobody’s contempt.”
And the Colonel sat down on his bench again.
Derville went away. On returning to his office, he sent Godeschal, at that time his second clerk, to the Comtesse Ferraud, who, on reading the note, at once paid the sum due to Comte Chabert’s lawyer.
In 1840, towards the end of June, Godeschal, now himself an attorney, went to Ris with Derville, to whom he had succeeded. When they reached the avenue leading from the highroad to Bicetre, they saw, under one of the elm-trees by the wayside, one of those old, broken, and hoary paupers who have earned the Marshal’s staff among beggars by living on at Bicetre as poor women live on at la Salpetriere. This man, one of the two thousand poor creatures who are lodged in the infirmary for the aged, was seated on a corner-stone, and seemed to have concentrated all his intelligence on an operation well known to these pensioners, which consists in drying their snuffy pocket-handkerchiefs in the sun, perhaps to save washing them. This old man had an attractive countenance. He was dressed in a reddish cloth wrapper-coat which the work-house affords to its inmates, a sort of horrible livery.
“I say, Derville,” said Godeschal to his traveling companion, “look at that old fellow. Isn’t he like those grotesque carved figures we get from Germany? And it is alive, perhaps it is happy.”
Derville looked at the poor man through his eyeglass, and with a little exclamation of surprise he said:
“That old man, my dear fellow, is a whole poem, or, as the romantics say, a drama. — Did you ever meet the Comtesse Ferraud?”
“Yes; she is a clever woman, and agreeable; but rather too pious,” said Godeschal.
“That old Bicetre pauper is her lawful husband, Comte Chabert, the old Colonel. She has had him sent here, no doubt. And if he is in this workhouse instead of living in a mansion, it is solely because he reminded the pretty Countess that he had taken her, like a hackney cab, on the street. I can remember now the tiger’s glare she shot at him at that moment.”
This opening having excited Godeschal’s curiosity, Derville related the story here told.
Two days later, on Monday morning, as they returned to Paris, the two friends looked again at Bicetre, and Derville proposed that they should call on Colonel Chabert. Halfway up the avenue they found the old man sitting on the trunk of a felled tree. With his stick in one hand, he was amusing himself with drawing lines in the sand. On looking at him narrowly, they perceived that he had been breakfasting elsewhere than at Bicetre.
“Good-morning, Colonel Chabert,” said Derville.
“Not Chabert! not Chabert! My name is Hyacinthe,” replied the veteran. “I am no longer a man, I am No. 164, Room 7,” he added, looking at Derville with timid anxiety, the fear of an old man and a child. — ”Are you going to visit the man condemned to death?” he asked after a moment’s silence. “He is not married! He is very lucky!”
“Poor fellow!” said Godeschal. “Would you like something to buy snuff?”
With all the simplicity of a street Arab, the Colonel eagerly held out his hand to the two strangers, who each gave him a twenty-franc piece; he thanked them with a puzzled look, saying:
“Brave troopers!”
He ported arms, pretended to take aim at them, and shouted with a smile:
“Fire! both arms! Vive Napoleon!” And he drew a flourish in the air with his stick.
“The nature of his wound has no doubt made him childish,” said Derville.
“Childish! he?” said another old pauper, who was looking on. “Why, there are days when you had better not tread on his corns. He is an old rogue, full of philosophy and imagination. But to-day, what can you expect! He has had his Monday treat. — He was here, monsieur, so long ago as 1820. At that time a Prussian officer, whose chaise was crawling up the hill of Villejuif, came by on foot. We two were together, Hyacinthe and I, by the roadside. The officer, as he walked, was talking to another, a Russian, or some animal of the same species, and when the Prussian saw the old boy, just to make fun, he said to him, ‘Here is an old cavalry man who must have been at Rossbach.’ — ’I was too young to be there,’ said Hyacinthe. ‘But I was at Jena.’ And the Prussian made off pretty quick, without asking any more questions.”
“What a destiny!” exclaimed Derville. “Taken out of the Foundling Hospital to die in the Infirmary for the Aged, after helping Napoleon between whiles to conquer Egypt and Europe. — Do you know, my dear fellow,” Derville went on after a pause, “there are in modern society three men who can never think well of the world — the priest, the doctor, and the man of law? And they wear black robes, perhaps because they are in mourning for every virtue and every illusion. The most hapless of the three is the lawyer. When a man comes in search of the priest, he is prompted by repentance, by remorse, by beliefs which make him interesting, which elevate him and comfort the soul of the intercessor whose task will bring him a sort of gladness; he purifies, repairs and reconciles. But we lawyers, we see the same evil feelings repeated again and again, nothing can correct them; our offices are sewers which can never be cleansed.
