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.<
br />
“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.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1186
