The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Off we go, Bichette! Off we go. Only you can save Stéphanie now, my beauty. Come on! We’ll rest later—or more likely die.”

  Wrapped in a pelisse to which he owed his continued existence and hardiness, Philippe set off at a run, stomping the packed snow to warm his feet. After no more than a hundred paces the major caught sight of a well-fed fire at the spot where, that morning, he’d left his coach in the care of an old trooper. A dreadful foreboding flooded over him. Like all those driven by an overpowering emotion amid this debacle, he found within himself the strength to rescue his friends, a strength he would never have had to save himself. Soon he was within a few paces of a sheltered hollow, well protected from the cannonballs, where he had left a young woman, his childhood companion and his most precious belonging!

  A few paces from the carriage, some thirty stragglers huddled around an enormous blaze, diligently stoking it with planks, boxes from the caissons, carriage wheels, and side panels. No doubt these soldiers were the latest newcomers to the crowd that filled the broad plain from Studyanka to the fateful river with a sort of sea of heads, fires, and huts, a living ocean stirred by vague currents, from which rose a vague hum, sometimes punctuated by fearsome shouts. Possessed by hunger and despair, the wretches had likely ransacked his carriage. The aged general and young woman they’d found inside, sleeping on bundles of baggage, wrapped in overcoats and pelisses, now sat slumped by the fire. One door of the carriage was broken. On hearing the horse and the major approaching, the mob let out a shout, a cry of rage inspired by hunger.

  “A horse! A horse!”

  Their many voices were one.

  “Get away! Look out!” cried two or three soldiers, training their weapons on the horse.

  Philippe leapt down and stood before his mare, saying, “Brigands! I’ll toss you into that fire of yours, every last man of you. There are dead horses up the hill! Go and get them.”

  “Oh, the officer’s quite a clown, isn’t he!” a giant of a grenadier shouted back. “One . . . two . . . will you get out of the way? No? Very well, suit yourself.”

  A woman’s cry rang out over the gunshot. Happily, Philippe was not hit, but Bichette sank to the ground, locked in a frantic struggle with death; three men rushed forward and finished her off with their bayonets.

  “Cannibals! Let me at least take the blanket and my pistols,” said Philippe, dismayed.

  “You can have the pistols all right,” answered the grenadier. “As for the blanket, this soldier’s had nothing in his gut for two days, and he’s standing here shivering in his miserable rags. He’s our general . . .”

  Philippe made no reply as he gazed on a man in worn shoes and a pair of trousers with holes in ten places, a forlorn, rime-crusted forage cap on his head. He quickly took up his pistols. Five men dragged the mare nearer the fire and set about cutting it up, deft as any Paris butcher’s boy. With miraculous speed, the pieces of meat were removed and dropped onto the embers. The major went to join the woman who had shrieked in despair on recognizing him. He found her sitting dully on a carriage cushion, warming herself; she stared at him in silence, never smiling. Not far away, Philippe spied the soldier he’d ordered to guard the carriage; the poor man was wounded. Outnumbered, he had yielded to the stragglers assailing him, but like a dog that has defended his master’s dinner to the end, he’d taken his share of the spoils and fashioned himself a sort of shawl from a white sheet. At the moment he was busy turning over a piece of the mare, and on his face the major saw unmingled joy at the feast to come. The Count de Vandières, whose mind had three days before slipped into a sort of second infancy, sat on a cushion near his wife and stared at the flames, their warmth beginning to dispel his torpor. Philippe’s arrival, the danger he’d faced, all this had left no impression on him, no more than the altercation that preceded the pillaging of the carriage. Sucy clasped the young countess’s hand, as if to convey his affection and his sorrow at seeing her reduced to these depths of misery, but he said nothing as he sat down on a nearby snow mound, now melting and trickling, and surrendered to the pleasure of warmth, forgetting all peril, forgetting everything. In spite of himself, an expression of almost mindless joy fell over his face, and he waited eagerly for his allotted strip of horsemeat to be done roasting. The aroma of that charred flesh inflamed his hunger, and his hunger silenced his heart, his courage, and his love. Without anger, he contemplated the fruits of his carriage’s despoliation. The men around the bonfire had shared among them the blankets, cushions, pelisses, gowns, everything that belonged to the count, the countess, and the major. Philippe turned around to see if there was anything more to be found in the chest. By the light of the flames, he saw the gold, diamonds, and silverware strewn on the ground, of interest to no one. To a man, every living soul that chance had brought to this fireside sat enveloped in an appalling silence, doing only what he thought necessary for his own well-being. There was something grotesque about such destitution. Haggard with cold, every face was caked with a layer of mud, rutted from eye to jaw by falling tears, making the thickness of that mask plain to see. The soldiers were disfigured further by long matted beards. Some of the men were wrapped in women’s shawls; others wore horses’ shabracks, soiled blankets, rags dusted with melting hoarfrost; some had one foot in a boot and the other in a shoe—in short, there was no one whose garb did not exhibit some quaint peculiarity. Amid these many causes for amusement, they remained serious and somber. The silence was troubled only by the crackling of the wood, the hiss of the flames, the distant murmur of the camp, and the saber blows inflicted on Bichette by the hungriest of the men in their eagerness to remove the choicest morsels. The weariest slept, and if one happened to roll into the fire, no one bothered to pull him to safety. If he wasn’t dead, reasoned these inflexible logicians, a good burn would surely spur him to find a more suitable spot. If the wretch awoke in the fire and died, no one pitied him. A few of the soldiers looked at each other, each as if justifying his own unconcern by the other’s indifference. Twice the young countess witnessed this sight and said nothing. Finally the pieces of meat on the embers were cooked, and everyone sated his own hunger, with the ravenousness that we find repellent in animals.

  “Thirty infantrymen on one horse! There’s a first time for everything!” cried the grenadier who had shot the mare.

  Such was the one quip that expressed the native wit of the French.

  Soon most of these pitiful soldiers bundled themselves up in whatever they were wearing, lay down on planks or anything else that might shield them from the snow, and slept, caring little for tomorrow. Once the major was warm and his hunger appeased, his eyelids grew heavy with an invincible need for rest. He gazed at the young woman all through the ensuing brief contest with slumber. She slept with her face turned to the fire, showing her closed eyes and a part of her forehead; she was wrapped in a lined pelisse and a thick dragoon’s greatcoat, her head on a bloodstained pillow; an astrakhan hat, secured by a handkerchief knotted under her chin, protected her face from the cold so far as it could; she’d tucked her feet beneath the coat. Curled on the ground as she was, she truly looked like nothing at all. Was she the last of the camp followers? Was she that magnificent woman, a lover’s pride and joy, the queen of the Parisian balls? Alas! Not even the eye of her most devoted friend could find any lingering trace of femininity in that pile of drapes and rags. Love had succumbed to the cold, in the heart of a woman. Through the thick veils that the most irresistible of all sleeps was pulling over the major’s eyes, he saw the husband and wife only as two shapeless spots. The flames of the bonfire, those prostrate human figures, that terrible cold raging three steps away from a tenuous warmth, everything was a dream. An unwelcome thought intruded into Philippe’s tormented mind. “If I sleep we’ll all die; I don’t want to sleep,” he told himself. He was sleeping. An hour later he was awakened by a terrible clamor and an explosion. The thought of his duty and of his lover’s danger fell leadenly on his heart once again. He let out a s
hout, like a lion’s roar. He and his adjutant were the only ones up. Before them they saw a sea of flame raging through a horde of men in the shadow of the night, devouring the campsites and huts; they heard shrieks of despair, howls; they spied thousands of defeated bodies and furious faces. At the heart of that hell, between two ranks of corpses, a column of soldiers was forcing its way toward the bridge.

  “That’s the rear guard retreating,” cried the major. “Now there’s no hope.”

  “I’ve spared your carriage, Philippe,” said a friendly voice.

  Turning around, Sucy recognized the young aide-de-camp by the light of the fire.

  “Ah! It’s no good,” answered the major. “They’ve eaten my horse. And in any case, how am I supposed to get that addle-headed general and his wife up and walking?”

  “Pick up a burning brand, Philippe, and threaten them!”

  “Threaten the countess!”

  “Adieu!” cried the aide-de-camp. “I only just have the time to cross that cursed river, and I must! I have a mother back in France! What a night! These wretches would rather stay here in the snow; most of them would sooner burn than stand up. It’s four in the morning, Philippe! In two hours, the Russians will be stirring. I promise you, you’ll see the Berezina clogged with corpses once again. Philippe, think of yourself! You have no horse, and you can’t carry the countess. There’s no other way, can’t you see? Come with me!” he said, taking him by the arm.

  “But my friend, the thought of abandoning Stéphanie!”

  The major clasped the countess in his arms and pulled her to her feet, shaking her with a desperate violence to force her awake; she looked at him with a fixed, deadened stare.

  “We must walk, Stéphanie, or we’ll die here.”

  The countess’s only response was to try to drop back to the ground and return to her slumbers. The aide-de-camp snatched up a burning brand and waved it in Stéphanie’s face.

  “We’ll save her in spite of herself!” cried Philippe, picking up the countess and placing her in the coach.

  He came back and beseeched his friend’s aid. The two of them lifted the old general, unsure if he was dead or alive, and set him down beside his wife. One by one, the major approached all those asleep on the ground and rolled them over with his foot, relieving them of what they had pillaged; he piled the clothes atop the two spouses and threw a few roasted strips of his mare into a corner of the carriage.

  “What are you planning to do?” asked the aide-de-camp.

  “Pull them,” said the major.

  “You’re mad!”

  “I am indeed!” cried Philippe, crossing his arms over his chest.

  All at once a desperate idea seemed to come to him.

  “Here, you,” he said, grasping his adjutant’s good arm, “I’m leaving her in your care for an hour! Mark this well: You must die before you allow anyone to come near this carriage.”

  The major picked up the countess’s diamonds with one hand; with the other he drew his saber and began to rain furious blows down on the sleepers who looked to him most intrepid. He succeeded in waking the gigantic grenadier and two other men of indeterminate rank.

  “We’re done for,” he told them.

  “I’m aware of that,” answered the grenadier. “All the same to me.”

  “Well then, since we’re dead either way, is it not better to give up one’s life for a beautiful woman and just possibly see France again?”

  “I’d rather sleep,” said one man, curling up in the snow. “And if you trouble me again, Major, you’ll find my saber in your gut!”

  “What’s the plan, officer?” the grenadier asked. “This man is drunk! He’s a Parisian—likes his comforts, you know!”

  “Brave grenadier, this is yours,” cried the major, showing him a diamond necklace, “if you will follow me and be prepared to fight like a madman. The Russians are ten minutes away on foot; they have horses; we’re going to make for their forward battery and help ourselves to a couple.”

  “But what about the sentinels, Major?”

  “One of us three—” he began, then broke off and looked at the aide-de-camp. “You’re coming, Hippolyte, aren’t you?”

  Hippolyte nodded.

  “One of us,” the major went on, “will deal with the sentinel. But for all we know those damned Russians are sleeping too.”

  “Ho, Major, you’ve got grit! But you’ll take me along in your berline?” said the grenadier.

  “Yes, if you don’t meet your maker up there. Should by any chance I perish, Hippolyte and you, grenadier, promise you’ll give your all to keep the countess safe.”

  “Agreed!” cried the grenadier.

  They started toward the Russian lines, toward the batteries that had so relentlessly pummeled the hopeless, supine masses on the riverbank. A few moments later, the galloping hooves of two horses resounded over the snow, and the reawakened battery fired several volleys that passed over the sleepers’ heads; the horses’ steps rang out as furiously as blacksmiths pounding iron. The devoted aide-de-camp had not survived. The sturdy grenadier was safe and sound. Philippe had taken a bayonet in one shoulder while defending his friend; nevertheless, he clutched the horse’s mane, and his legs squeezed the animal like a powerful vise.

  “God be praised!” cried the major, finding his carriage just where he’d left it, and his adjutant standing tranquilly beside it.

  “If you’re a just man, officer, you’ll see to it I get the Cross of Honor. We did some nice work up there, didn’t we? Showed them a thing or two!”

  “We haven’t done anything yet! Let’s hitch up the horses. Take these ropes.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Well then, grenadier, give that crowd of layabouts a good going-over, and help yourself to their shawls, their linens—”

  “Say, this joker’s dead!” cried the grenadier, divesting the first one he came to. “Well, what do you know, they’re all dead!”

  “All of them?”

  “Every one! Looks like that horsemeat didn’t agree with them—that or the generous helping of snow on the side!”

  These words sent a shiver through Philippe. The cold was twice as bitter as before.

  “God! To think of losing a woman I’ve saved twenty times over . . .” The major shook the countess by her shoulders, crying, “Stéphanie! Stéphanie!”

  The young woman opened her eyes.

  “Madame! We’re saved.”

  “Saved,” she repeated, falling back.

  They hitched up the horses as best they could. Holding his saber in his good hand and the reins in the other, his pistols at his sides, the major climbed onto the first horse, the grenadier onto the second. His feet frozen stiff, the old adjutant had been heaved crosswise into the carriage atop the general and the countess. Spurred on by the saber, the horses hurtled forward, speeding the carriage down onto the plain, where difficulties without number awaited the major. Soon there was no way to go on without crushing the men, women, even children asleep on the ground. The grenadier did what he could to rouse them, but they stubbornly refused to move. Monsieur de Sucy searched in vain for the path that the rear guard had cleared: It had vanished like a ship’s wake on the water. They advanced at a crawl, continually halted by soldiers threatening to kill the horses.

  “Do you want to get through?” asked the grenadier.

  “If it costs me every drop of blood in my body, if it costs me the whole world,” answered the major.

  “Then forward! You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs!”

  And the grenadier of the guard spurred the horses over the slumbering bodies, bloodied the wheels, toppled the huts, left two furrows of corpses in that field of heads. Let it nonetheless be said that he never failed to cry out, in a thundering voice, “Out of the way, you moldering bastards!”

  “These poor people!” cried the major.

  “Bah! It’s this or the cold, this or the cannon!” said the grenadier, urging the horses
ever on, pricking them with the point of his saber.

  A calamity that should have befallen them long before, which they had thus far been spared only by miraculous good fortune, now put a sudden halt to their progress. The carriage tipped over.

  “I had an idea this would happen!” cried the imperturbable grenadier. “Oh! Oh! Our friend is dead.”

  “Poor Laurent,” said the major.

  “Laurent! From the Fifth Cavalry?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s my cousin. Ah well! Not much fun in this life at the moment. I don’t imagine he’ll miss it.”

  Only after an interminable, irreparable delay was the carriage righted and the horses untangled. Awakened and wrenched from her torpor by the violent jolt, the young countess had thrown off her wraps and stood up.

  “Philippe, where are we?” she whispered, looking around her.

  “Five hundred paces from the bridge. We’re heading over the Berezina. And then, once we reach the other side, Stéphanie, I’ll torment you no longer, I’ll let you sleep, we’ll be safe, we can go on untroubled to Vilnius. May God grant that you never know the price paid for your life!”

  “You’re wounded!”

  “It’s nothing.”

  The hour of the catastrophe had sounded. Daybreak was announced by the Russians’ guns. Masters of Studyanka, they unleashed a withering fire over the plain; in the first light of morning, the major spied their columns advancing, positioning themselves on the heights. A cry of alarm erupted from the multitudes; a moment later they’d all leapt to their feet. Instinctively sensing their peril, they hurtled toward the bridge like a mighty wave. The Russians poured down from the heights, fast as a brush fire. Men, women, children, horses, everything bolted onto the bridge. Happily, the major and the countess were still at some distance from the riverbank. General Éblé had just set fire to the trestles on the opposite side. The cries of warning addressed to those now packed onto that life raft fell on deaf ears; no one would turn back. Not only did the bridge give way under their weight; in their frantic race toward the murderous riverbank, a great mass of humanity poured into the Berezina like an avalanche. No shriek could be heard, only a dull sound like a stone falling into water, and a moment later, the river was clotted with corpses. So fierce was the backlash created by those retreating onto the plain in hopes of escaping that death, and so violent their collision with those still advancing, that many were asphyxiated on the spot. The Count and Countess de Vandières owed their life to the carriage. After trampling and breaking so many dying bodies, the horses were soon crushed to death in their turn, overrun by the human cyclone sweeping over the bank. The major and the grenadier survived purely by main force. They killed so as not to be killed. This hurricane of human faces, this surge of bodies animated by one single movement left the bank of the Berezina deserted for a few moments. The herd had poured back onto the plain. If some threw themselves into the river from the bank, it was less in hopes of reaching the other side, which for them meant France, than simply of fleeing the Siberian wastelands. For a few particularly audacious souls, desperation became a guardian angel. An officer reached the other bank by leaping from one lump of ice to the next; a soldier crawled miraculously over floating corpses. In the end, the vast crowd realized that the Russians would not kill twenty thousand unarmed men, numb with cold, their senses dulled, who made no attempt to defend themselves, and with a horrible resignation settled down to await their fate. The major, the grenadier, the old general, and his wife were thus left alone, just steps away from what had once been a bridge. These four stood silent and dry-eyed amid a field of dead bodies, in the company of a few able soldiers, a few officers whose fighting spirit had been revived by the circumstances, numbering perhaps fifty. Two hundred paces away, the major descried what was left of the carriage bridge, swallowed by the river two days before.